Typeform Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

This $100m ARR Company Is Making a Major Change to their Q3 2024 Marketing Strategy - YouTube

https

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDRiN3U3BQ

Transcript

(00:00) 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 (00:41) 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 (01:16) 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 (01:59) 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 (02:40) 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 (03:25) 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 (04:12) 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 (04:55) 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 (05:44) 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 (06:26) 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 (07:11) 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 (07:58) 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 (08:37) 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 (09:16) 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 (10:03) 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 (10:43) 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 (11:31) 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 (12:13) 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 (12:53) submission is a proxy for Value right because when you ask questions the value is from the answers so the more answers from more people the more value you get another thing that happened is that we were decreasing our growth rate we were focused on Google search ads so what we did was the natural thing let's do more things right so let's add more channels and sources let's kick off a um initially small sales team let's do actions after support right let's start maybe conversations with potential resellers and Tech (13:35) Partners all of those were different thems with different budgets with different customer interactions different data and different processes right and different tools so there was a huge amount of fragmentation that we understood was inefficient for instance if a lead is discarded by the AE or the SDR because it's no longer sufficiently qualified that lead might be lost that lead might not go to the marketing team because these are two different teams right second they are looking at their job obviously they want to optimize for (14:18) their maximum and that's a local maximum that's not the type form or the customer maximum so this is when we thought okay instead of having so many different themes and processes and in the end customer funnels why don't we think about one funnel it's one company it's one goal it's one funnel so one funnel the five steps to this it's taken quite some time I mean in the end when I look back it's most of last year right the first step it's a simple step some of these steps are simple that doesn't make them easy but the first (15:04) step is about going from fragmented teams and budgets to one team one budget from optimizing those local maximums to optimizing for the global maximum what we did was hire a revenue leader and we brought in all of the goto Market Revenue related department so now marketing and sales and channel sales and customer care and customer success and even pricing and packaging are reporting to that one person and there is a repops function that takes a look holistically at all of these functions and data sets and Def determines what is (15:52) best right for the company not for each one of these departments so unifying going from fragmented to a unified team the Second Step here is about now that you have one team now that you you can start thinking about what are these data uh or interaction points with my customer what information do I get where do I get that information and go from fragmented data sets from let's say that reside in different tools so there's different fragmented tool sets and also fragmented processes to a unified customer-driven Tech (16:36) stack we as typ form believe and this is what we promote that every company has to be very close to their customers or to those valued audiences right you have to talk to them so we always start with this zero party data we believe that data is very important because it's an opportunity to engage the people it's an opportunity to ask and get their intention and the information Straight From the Source so that zero party data for us is very important it it can start in a contact us form it can be because a survey or um let's say a form um (17:17) triggered in your web page it can also be because it's something that um opens up inside the app or inside the software tool that is important but it's not enough your companies have a lot of other data that you can use data about for instance what ad this person saw what landing page this person comes from right all of that let's say marketing activity type type of data you also have a lot of product type of data did the did the person sign up did the person start creating a form for instance in our case right or all of that data is (18:00) the first party data the data you collect from the customer is zero party data this data is the first party data and then you can also buy third party data who is that person what company does that person work for in what title or in what position in what capacity right all of that data is contextual so you not only have the responses but you now know the respondent this is very important because think of about product feedback you might get product feedback but you might want to understand if that product feedback is provided by somebody who is (18:38) an expert user in your product or it's a a basic user a novice user of your product so you have to understand the responses but also in the context of who is responding with all of that now you can start personalizing you can start setting every individual every different segment in the right path step three is about understanding the customer but the customers that we like so in the past we used to have oh this is not my customer because I'm in sales this is too small for me oh this is not my customer because I am in marketing (19:27) and I I don't I mean I I do selfs serve right so going from those fragmented views of who our customer is to one type of uh let's say to one unified view of different segments right and the other thing that we learn is that while you have to start somewhere and generally is by doing an adoc Consulting type of analysis that says this is your target Persona this is your ICP this is your buyer Persona that thing is a static picture that cannot remain static right so as you collect information and you bring these fragmented sources into one (20:06) unified data set you also go into what is static and a priori to Dynamic ever evolving and based on feedback loops what is really working the fourth step is about now you can think of different Journeys for different segments so for instance one segment is people who are inbound in our contact us form another journey is people that marketing could try to grab their attention bring them as mqls and then they need a separate type of action in one case is mostly hand raisers it's inbound in another case we are going outbound with a (20:52) combination of marketing and sales right it's very important to prioritize and here again I would go back back to where do you have the biggest numbers where can you achieve the biggest numbers what is most probable that it's going to have an impact for you in the shorter term generally contact T shows High intent and that has um let's say a more probability of success finally measurement right so all of these funnels can have their kpis and you have to measure what is happening how many people come into contact us how (21:30) many people are um taking the call and so on by doing this in a very personalized Way by bringing all this data knowing your customer and different customer segments the final step or the final thing that I want to share with you is it seems to work it took us a year to get here but in the last nine weeks in terms of the highest valued customers which is the end Enterprise skus we've been seeing record levels of new revenue generated we have increased a lot the opportunities with the additional targeting we have increased (22:11) the lead quality because of this enrichment so wasting a lot less time of your AES and sdrs and we have also personalized those interactions to make sure that more and more of those people actually respond to the petitions to a meeting with let's say Sur surp passed in the end Revenue numbers so that was that for me I think I almost made it in 20 minutes it was 21 minutes and I hope it was useful thank you very much [Applause]

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is David Okonyev. If you listen to the show, you know we've had Typeform one many times. Last time David and I spoke, he was launching Typeform's official second product video ask. He's now on to something more exciting. We're gonna talk about it today. David, are ready to take us to the top? Yep. Alright. So you're just like you just like going from zero to one. Right? You're like, once it breaks a [00:18] million in revenue, you get bored, you move on to the next product. [00:20] >> Well, a bit further than that, but, yeah, I like the early stage of of product building and being a small team. It's where the juice is. [00:29] So pick up where we left off with video asking, we'll dive into the new product. So when you came on last, you were just launching the PayWall. I think you'd broke 1,200,000 maybe in ARR, but what's the status of that today? How's how's it going? [00:40] >> The the product's around 3,000,000 in in ARR, And so I I stepped away from it around six months ago because I'm basically, I run a very small r and d team, we split up new products, and Vidyo Ask was one of those new products. And then we built up the team around that, and then I handed that over to the product team in Typeform. And now I'm working on a new product with just me and another [01:03] >> developer, and, yeah, we're we're actually about to release it well, start to beta release it with a few people. So yeah. Excited. [01:12] This is great. Okay. There's a bunch of stuff to unpack here. So I guess first off, you left video ask when it broke 3,000,000 in revenues. Did anything change Before about like [01:20] >> that. Before. Something. Yeah. [01:23] And so what did you I mean, how did you know it was ready to sort of pass off and that it wouldn't just crash and burn if you stopped focusing on it? [01:29] >> Well, it was more of a case that, you know, I there was another idea coming up, and I wanted to explore the audio and meeting space, the voice, let's say, async audio and meeting space, and it's quite a hot space now, so I wanted to jump into that. And so I think it was time to move on. [01:49] Mhmm. Yeah. You're seeing sort of Slack ad in the bottom left. Hey. Use use audio to send messages or do do a do a walkie walkie talkie style sort of thing. [01:56] >> This is the space There's for a bunch of products on the market doing async audio and also meeting insights. We try to combine the two, like async conversations for less, so that you have less meetings and then using AI to enhance actual meetings and then actually even combining the two. Imagine starting a conversation async via voice, then jumping into a meeting and then doing the follow ups with voice as well in an async well, async, essentially. [02:27] So what's the name of the product? [02:29] >> It's called Relayed or Relayed, however you wanna spell it. Sorry. Pronounce it. R e l a y e d dot a I. And and, yeah, the promise is is fewer, better meetings, essentially. And we're just about to start letting people into the beta. So just head off to the website and and register, and we'll let you in soon. [02:52] How many how what's on the how many on the beta list right now? [02:56] >> Well, we we I just the only thing we've done so far is I did a LinkedIn post, like, last month, and we have a few 100 there. So hopefully now we'll get a few more people in and Typhoon will promote it as well, so we'll start pushing it. But it's been pretty much under wraps up till now. [03:13] So I think what's interesting here for anyone listening is, right, you guys are not I mean, this is not a small company. Right? I mean, you guys, I believe you I mean, you just did a 135,000,000 series c at a 935,000,000 valuation. Right? [03:23] >> Yeah. [03:24] That that was pre money or post? [03:26] >> Post money valuation. [03:27] Okay. Post. So flirting was sort of unicornish status. And last time you came on the show, mean, you said ARR was right around 48,000,000 in ARR. I what? You guys are, like, 70 now. Right? [03:38] >> A bit bit bit more than that. [03:39] Bit more. So, like, the fact that you've sort of and and you were one of the original founders. Right? [03:44] >> Yeah. Yeah. We're two co founders. [03:47] 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 Founder Path. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you [04:10] 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 Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, [04:34] 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 is [04:56] 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 1,200,000 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 multiple. [05:21] 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 Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in [05:43] a 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 [06:10] jump back into the interview. So the fact that you've been able to sort of create this little niche instead of a much larger company where you are able to stay very nimble and flexible and and basically be the r and d team, think is really interesting to learn about. So what is the team today? Right? So, like, the r and d team you're leading, what name name the roles of the people on that team. [06:27] >> It's just two people. Really? Just you and an engineer. Team, now we're we're two. So I act as product manager, designer, and and now I'm doing front end development as well. And then I work with a guy called Neil, who's just a fantastic product person, super rounded, back end, front end, just also great product ideas. We make a duo basically in the company and we're splitting up these new products. I mean, just just to go back [06:58] >> to why this is happening, I I think we're kind of repeating what what what we did in the beginning with Typeform. We were just, you know, product designers trying to solve a problem, and then we had to become managers and CEOs. I was co CEO with my co founder. And eventually that [07:20] >> had its date on it and we grew tired of that and we wanted to get back to product. My co founder eventually left the company, but I carried on with the premise of being able to spin up new products and explore innovation within the vision of Typeform. And that's basically what I'm doing. So I did Typeform, then I did Vidyoask, and now I'm doing Relayed. [07:44] That's very interesting. So how do you let's say you launch the paywall here in a couple weeks, you know, it starts to go off, you need more resources. How do you get more resources, you know, engineers, whatever on this product outside of the main company? [07:57] >> Well, we're not launching a paywall in two weeks, but if we were and we needed to scale up the team. With Vidyoask, we didn't hire too much internally. Just gradually put people in the team. Honestly, a big believer you don't need that many people to launch a product and actually sometimes the more people you add to it, sometimes the slower you go. So we'll do a beta now, it's just the two of us. We'll probably add [08:25] >> another engineer just to give us a little bit more grunt. And then we'll need to build the paywall and all that stuff, maybe add an extra engine in. And then beyond that, we've got to see how it goes. But I do want to keep things nimble because I think you can move really fast if you have the right people. [08:40] And what's driving this sort of R and D roadmap? Is it really whatever you're curious about? Or do you have some systematic way to capture feedback from your user base and that's what's driving? [08:49] >> Nothing systematic. Just the same way that Typeform was built and Vidyoask was built. We just wanted to make more human interactions around data collection, so that's Typeform and and Vidyoask. Relay goes a bit of a tangent to that because it's not purely data collection, it's more about messaging and conversation. But Typeform is all about helping businesses have better relationships internally, externally. So we think of a purely conversational talk would be really useful. Plus, you know, we [09:24] >> have our day to day lives at work is a lot of conversations and sometimes they can be really inefficient, they can take a lot of time, so we're trying to make it as as helpful as possible to to try and help save people time so they can do more of their best work. [09:43] And if relayed takes off and and works out perfectly, what does the world look like in two to three years? [09:49] >> In terms of? [09:51] Well, if everyone's using Relay. Right? Let's say your vision of what it should be works and gets adopted. What does the world look like? [09:57] >> Obviously, that'd be great. I mean, that means that people are not jumping into meetings immediately whenever they have something they want to say. They can actually resolve a lot of things very quickly just by hearing each other's voices. Then also because part of the product is very much about capturing meetings from Zoom, analyzing them, splitting them into chapters, getting insights. So we really want to help people that might miss a meeting to catch up very quickly [10:26] >> or to share meetings with other people so they can get the insights and and and go through it really quickly. I I don't know how many times you've been shared a Zoom recording of of a meeting and you you can't sit there watching the whole Zoom recording. You wanna just be able to just get the nuggets out and really quickly, you know, try to zoom in on certain sections. What we've built is basically an inbox for [10:49] >> that kind of communications to ingest your Zoom meetings. Later it will be other types of meetings as well, but right now we're focusing on Zoom. Also the inbox will be able to handle the async conversations with just audio messages as well. It's something to try, something quite new. So it's quite exciting to be able to pull something a bit away from pure data collection and forms. [11:15] And David, I mean, you're selling this. People are getting excited listening. Maybe a question they're thinking is, wait, why is David Buildings inside of Typeform? Why not spin it out as its own thing? Why is that? [11:24] >> Anyway, I'm loyal. I don't know. Look, one good thing about being able to do it inside the company is that there's not the same pressures that founders have when they start a new product in terms of being able to get it funded and running out of funding, etcetera. So it's quite a comfortable situation for me and I'm free to really explore without too much pressure. Obviously, I'm trying to deliver products and they might not all work, [11:54] >> but there is a space to be able to experiment and see what sticks. [11:58] Yep. And how many customers across the whole company? Say I think last to make you mind, you guys were breaking 100,000. [12:04] >> I have the latest numbers on top of me. [12:08] >> Must be 130, 40, not sure the latest numbers. Mhmm. [12:13] A 130, that's great. And then [12:17] you were very proud last time I came on, still profitable. It's gonna be hard to say profitable when you raise $135,000,000 [12:21] >> No. Actually, well, we've started investing a lot more in growing the team. We're nearing 500 people, so we flirted with being profitable and then we've reinvested now. So, you know, just trying to get onto a new growth curve, you know, the next stage of Typeform, trying to bring in, you know, more enterprise features, but as well trying to make Typeform more relevant in people's processes, right? Not just being a form, but being like, you know, really [12:49] >> embedded inside people's day to day businesses. [12:53] Yeah. We're a customer. We feed all our Typeform data directly into our Airtable, which is like our marketing database, right, for our team. So we are very dependent on Typeform and our user flows, we love it. Of the 135,000,000, how much that was secondary? [13:09] >> I'm I I can't disclose. [13:13] Can you give a more or less than 50%? Can you give a range? [13:16] >> It was it was much less than 50%. [13:19] Much less than 50. And then strategically, why isn't I mean, you've been around since 2011. So there are first employees sitting on options that with like no ability to like cash in. Obviously, you wanna release that pressure valve a little bit. Right? What was the importance of doing some? [13:32] >> We did that in the last round before. We didn't actually do this on on on this round. Okay. There was oversubscribed. [13:40] So so secondary in terms of this round investors selling their stake or founders taking some money off the table? [13:46] >> There's a combination of both, yeah. [13:48] Yeah, yeah, okay. But just to be clear, the series B you did back in 2017, you said you We did some did [13:53] >> allow employees to sell, if I remember, up to 50% of what they actually had. So there was quite quite a bit to take off the table, but it was much earlier. [14:04] Yeah. In terms of in term when you say what they had, what what they what they had already vested. Right? [14:08] >> Yeah. What they had vested, they could sell up to 50%. I I think I also did. Can't quite remember, but yeah. [14:15] And what's next step? I mean, you say you know, I guess we look at this Elon news, private is the new public, I guess, but do you wanna run or help run a publicly traded SaaS company in the next two or three years or no? [14:25] >> That's not my ambition, but let's see. Let's see where Typeform goes. I mean, [14:33] >> in the next two, three years, we're definitely gonna be looking be in that area of considering it. It, so so let's see. But who knows? I mean, everything's kinda trending down, so not a great time to to do to be thinking about an IPO or well, definitely not doing one. So let's see. [14:49] Did you guys have term sheets before sort of a downturn above a billion dollar valuation? Or [14:55] >> Yeah. The timing was quite good, I have to say. [14:59] For for the the timing was good for them or for you? [15:01] >> For for us. For us. We we yeah. It happened just before the downturn. [15:08] Okay. So what I was asking is you didn't have term sheets for, a billion 5 and raising a 135,000,000, and then they they took them back and gave you a lower valuation. You timed it perfectly. [15:16] >> What what I'd say is that [15:20] >> if we were raising today, it would be harder to get those valuations because the multiples have gone down now, obviously. Yeah. [15:26] Yeah. No. That's great. Any strategic partners in the round? [15:31] >> As in, like, smaller angels [15:33] Who who led? Who led the $1.35? [15:35] >> Safina, which is a Belgian company. I'm actually from Belgium, so it's quite funny that they they end up lead leading. But we also brought in some some other US investors. Also, our current investors reinvested as well. [15:51] That's great. Alright. So four ninety ish approaching 500 on the team. Nice little R and D outfit going here. Hoping to change the way teams work by building, again, data collection, interactions, etcetera. Seems like really asynchron if Relayed works, there's gonna be a lot of lot more asynchronous communication, less watching Zoom videos, searching for key moments. Right? It's all gonna be organized data. [16:11] >> Yeah. I mean, what we're hoping to do is that you can start a con I think I mentioned this, but start a conversation, prepare people for a meeting, async, jump into the meeting, get all the insights. And then if there's any follow ups after, you can just package that all into one conversation, which we call a Relay. So let's [16:31] see. And last question on this before we wrap up. Why not go buy a tool with that already has some traction in the space and build on that? [16:40] >> No. That's just not something we've considered. I I think it's also because we're we're this is a bit of a moonshot, and it was not something strategic that we said, like, we need to look in this area. It's just something that I'm needing. So, you know, I think we can do it our way and probably have a better result. [16:57] No technical debt to deal with. No customer transition. None of that stuff. [17:01] >> Yeah. [17:02] Alright, David. Let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, what's the last book that you read? Humankind. Humankind. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [17:14] >> No. Not studying anyone. [17:16] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building do Relayed. [17:23] >> Well, just coding really. Use Figma to design and coding in React and bunch of other technologies. [17:33] And number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [17:36] >> At the moment, not too bad. Like, seven hours. [17:40] It's pretty good. And what situation? Married, single, kids? [17:43] >> I'm married. Got kids. [17:44] Still three kids? [17:46] >> Three kids, but two from previous marriage. Yeah. Married. One is is not my my my is not from this marriage. My wife has another kid as well. So [17:58] Three kiddos. That's great. Did you celebrate a birthday? Are you 40, 45 now or still 44? [18:02] >> I'm 45. Yeah. [18:04] 45. Very good. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [18:08] >> Sorry? [18:09] Something you wish you knew back when you were 20. [18:15] >> Something that I wish I knew when I was 20. I probably answered this the same way before because I think you asked me. Everything's gonna be okay. [18:24] You're remarkably consistent. Figma was the same. Kids were the same. The twenty year device is the same. Yes. [18:30] >> I'm I'm done with having more kids. That's for sure. [18:34] Fair enough. Guys, they're already here to David, cofounder of Typeform launched in 2011, broke a million dollars in revenue back in, call it 2014. Now up above $70,000,000 in AR, just raised 135. Very small portion of that was secondary at a $935,000,000 post money valuation, but now working on a very cool new tool called Relay. Just him and another engineer inside of Typeform. They're launching the beta here shortly after David posted about it on LinkedIn and [18:57] built a pre sort of beta list of a couple 100 folks. We'll see what happens. David, thanks for taking us to the top. [19:02] >> Okay. Thanks. [19:05] One 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 1PM [19:30] 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, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [19:53] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [20:15] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [20:34] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

[00:00] Hello, everyone. My guest today is David Okunev. He is building a company, you've probably heard of it, Typeform. Inside of Typeform, he released a new product called VideoAsk, which we'll focus on today. We'll have a lot of fun. David Rory takes the top. Yeah. Let's let's talk tight let's tease VideoAsk for a second. When did you launch it? [00:17] >> Yeah. [00:20] >> Officially about a just over a year ago, but we were we were running it as a beta for around eight months. Okay. [00:26] So give us parent company first, Typeform. When did you guys launch? Have co founder, I think. When did you launch the company? [00:33] >> So Typeform was launched around ten years ago, something like that, in 2012. Yeah, like I said, Videos was officially launched like beginning of last year. Mhmm. [00:45] And give me a bit of a sense of the early days of Typeform. The first year, I mean, you remember what were you two thinking about? Were you bootstrapped? [00:53] >> Yeah, we were bootstrapped, but actually it's kind of like trying to repeat the same journey again with VidyoSports. This time I'd have to raise the capital, so it's quite a nice sweet spot. [01:05] Let's come back to the capital question here in a second. But again, let's let's one more question on Typeform, then we'll go to VideoAsk. [01:12] >> Yeah. What [01:14] when when people are paying for Typeform, assume you did something to learn about what you should build next, and then VideoAsk sort of surfaced. So walk me through how you used your Typeform user base to uncover the need for Vidyoasks. [01:27] >> Actually, to be completely honest, it's not something that came out of any user research, just like Typeform did. It was just an intuition that we wanted to create better forms and Videosk is just an extension of that. It's like how can you make forms more human while put humans in them. It just seemed like a logical pathway for us to take. [01:47] And at the end of twenty twenty, before we dive deeper into the Videosk product, can you give me a general sense of where Typeform was and maybe how many customers you guys are working with? [01:55] >> We're approaching 100,000 customers now. [01:58] Wow. And you [02:00] >> I think we just passed actually. [02:02] Okay. That's an exclusive. There we go, but we like exclusive over to 100,000 past on time form. [02:08] >> Yeah, yeah. [02:08] Now you have raised capital but you know, I usually like bootstrappers but if you raise capital and you do it in an efficient way, that's not crazy to do, but it can work out nicely. So talk to me a bit about your funding journey. How much have you guys raised? [02:19] >> 50,000,000. [02:21] Okay. So [02:21] >> that's 52, I think. [02:22] Would you do it again? Would [02:25] >> would we do it again inside TideFloom? [02:27] Would you do the exact same thing or would you try and bootstrap or do something, raise I'm [02:30] >> actually going back. Well, yeah, I think so. Think we needed to because we really didn't have a clue what we were doing and I think our investors actually helped us learn how to run a SaaS business. [02:41] Yeah, no regrets. And help me understand, you know, there's different sort of go to market motions, freemium, know, SMB, etcetera. What's the average customer paying you per month? [02:53] >> Around $40. [02:54] 40. And and what's your most effective way to get people addicted is like number of type forms or the number of customized fields? I I know we pay because we do, like, a bunch of your if then statements built into the type form and we wanted that extra feature. Yeah. You know what? I don't know off the top of my mind. [03:10] >> Top of top of the head. I've been so buried in the last year and a half that that I've kind of, like, gotten away from that. But, you know, I think it's a typical thing. In fact, to assume it's like the ability to use advanced features like logic, redirection. There's also a certain amount of questions you can go on to type from on a free plan. Those are big up sellers to to paid plans. Yep. [03:32] And then, again, I wanna talk about video ask if you have a paid plan, what usage looks like. Just wrapping up the story on Typeforming, can I take the 100,000 times that $40 average you gave me? Mean, did you also just pass about what, 4,000,000 a month in revenue? [03:47] >> Yeah. I guess you're close. [03:49] That's exciting. I love [03:50] >> it when you do this. [03:51] Why why do you do you listen to the show? You listen to Yeah. [03:57] >> Not not that much, but it was the same thing last time. I kind of enjoyed it. [04:01] Yeah. Well, it's fun. You know, the show doesn't work without founders like you who are game to share these sort of data points, right? Like, otherwise you get I'm these biz just [04:10] >> making sure kind of, like, on the spot, like, I I don't like things that you have to prepare for, so this It's is just like, just dive into the deeper. [04:19] It's all the other shows. You're be like, David, what was your biggest failure? What was your biggest success story? You know, it's no fun. Okay. [04:26] >> So They send you a list of questions, and they're like, oh, jeez. I have to prepare this in some smart. [04:33] Million run rate. Okay. Let's go to video ask. Tell us what the product does. Yeah. [04:36] >> So it's an async video interaction tool. Essentially, you can build a kind of workflow journey where you can take people through a journey. You ask questions via video, you can collect answers via video, text, audio, market choice, you can collect payment, NPS, and and you can do like a series of these things just like the form. Yep. And the other dimension of it is that, you know, with Typeform, it's just collecting the data and then analyzing [05:05] >> it. With Videos, there's a step more. You can actually respond. So you can respond by video, and then you get into, like, in like, a asynchronous video conversation. So it's really just a a great way to get like face to face with customers or anyone like like, you know, in a business context of course, like in the most effective and quick and visceral manner. [05:27] Yep. So the reason this space is very interesting to me is there are different mouse traps on the peripheries relative to like the spot where you're playing. So for example, you know, Yak, right, has sent me up and said, use our tool to do like video back and forth and get ask your audience video questions for your show. Then you have Loom, which I use with my team to record, like, how to videos, and I send [05:46] them off a Loom video, asynchronous video. And then you've got, like, you know, Vidyard and that crew that have a little tool internally that is really an enterprise motion version of Loom. So where where do you see yourself sort of in this space? [05:56] >> Yeah. I think, obviously, we're we're in we're in the video space like those those that you've mentioned. I think what Vidyo Ask is doing differently is we're going, like, deep into the video interaction kind of form based workflow. Whereby, let's say, Loom is more about doing presentation, and you might have a call to action. Like with Videos, you know, we we we have we have logic, we we trans we transcribe everything, we've even released a feature [06:24] >> soon where it transcribes live in the browser based on listening. It will jump to a different question. So we're really, like, we're really, like, going deep into, like, video interaction without it being one of these video interaction tools where you just, put that, you know, like, what do you call that hot spots on the videos. We're we're really just trying to yeah. It's I would say it's kinda like the next generation type form for people that [06:48] >> really wanna get visceral. Yeah. [06:51] There's also a use case here where there are CPG brands that always wanna collect video testimonials and this is a great way That's to do [06:57] >> a use case for us, but I think, you know, recruitment, feedback, you know, just like embedding a video on website just as a widget as a contact form where you can just say and we have loads of customers using this just like presenting themselves on the website because they realize that if they put their own personal brand and actually talk to people, they actually get more engagement. And then people might respond by video, audio or text, [07:23] >> and then, you know, you're in a conversation with that person because you can reply back. So it's just a really quick way of just like actually like going jumping through all the hoops so you can actually get a meeting and actually create a meaningful and personal connection. [07:39] Now, do you have the luxury of not having to worry about revenue because you're built inside of Typeform which makes revenue? In other words, do [07:45] >> you have [07:45] a pay plan for video [07:46] >> It's a double edged sword because we have the luxury of not having to raise capital or worrying about like running out of funds, but you know, I I I I needs to be successful for us to like carry it on, so I've had that pressure as as kind of like the the lead on the project. [08:03] What does that feel like, David? What does that pressure feel like? What number are trying to hit? [08:06] >> Well, I I I think it's been okay because we've just been on a tear, like the team's great, we've just been shipping features so fast and we're just pretty sure of what we're doing, so I don't think we've felt that pressure so much. The first year of this has been pretty, let's say, like, you know, let's say easy to get to that first well, we've done, like, what, around 1,400,000 ARR in the first year of the [08:34] >> of the product, and [08:35] Oh, you do have a paid product then? [08:37] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. Paid, like like so as I mentioned, first year was, like first first year was beta, and then we we we launched it properly last year, and it's, like, been, like, a year a year and a bit like running it as a paid product and [08:52] That's so amazing. So just just to repeat it back to you. So 2019 was all free. You launched paid in 2020 and hit a $1,400,000 run rate by the end of twenty twenty? [08:59] >> Yeah. [09:00] What do you think you can hit by the end of this year? [09:04] >> Look, I mean, video is just exploding. So [09:09] >> and and I think we have a really unique product in the marketplace and we're seeing interest from all all sorts of tiers, you know, even, like, strangely enough, like, we're we're getting a lot of interest from enterprise as well, which, like, you're seeing this as an innovative solution. So, yeah, I think we can three x or more by That's the end the great. [09:32] And when you look at the 1,400,000 that video ask added to just Typeform as a whole parent company, I'm just curious from a growth I was a grain of gonna say sand. Well, okay, so it is a grain of sand. Was gonna ask percent of the total growth in 2020 came from video ask revenue? [09:49] >> What's the well, I I just said overall in terms of, like, ARR. I mean, obviously, you made the calculation, but, you know, like, Typeform is is like in the order of like 40 something times times bigger at the moment. But, you know, it's Typeform and it's been in operation for a long time and, you know, but [10:08] How fast does Typeform grow over the [10:10] >> winning products. Yeah. [10:12] Did how much did Typeform grow up on a percent basis over the past twelve months? The whole company. [10:16] >> Mean, around around six 50%, I believe. [10:22] 50%? Okay. And are you guys I mean, are you happy with that? [10:26] >> Yeah. I mean, at this stage, like, it's it's good. I mean, we've actually accelerated in the last year. Like, we had a big management change, like, two years ago. Actually, I stepped down. I was CEO. And the company's been performing, like, like, really, really well. And I think, you know, the the momentum's really there there now. [10:44] Is Robert I just don't know because I only know you as Robert [10:46] >> Robert stepped down Robert stepped down, like, a little bit of time after we both stepped down as CEOs. [10:53] Is he still active? [10:55] >> Active on [10:56] In the company? [10:57] >> Just at the board level. Just at So the board [10:59] you're way more active than he is in terms of operations? Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm totally [11:04] >> in the weeds. I mean, I'm I'm just I'm product designing, product managing, and and and even coding now. So, yeah. Wow. Totally back back to square one and and loving it. [11:13] This is great. Okay. This is very interesting. Do you see I mean, it'd be very interesting that internally to see if the video ads product can eventually overtake the Typeform product in terms of total revenue. [11:21] >> I always cheekily say so, but Yeah. That's just to create that sense of, like, you know, the competition. [11:27] Talk to me about about churn. So when someone installs video ask, I assume you wanna get them to send, two videos in at least ten minutes to, like, drastically increase if they stick around. What does, like, churn look like today? [11:38] >> Yeah. I mean, it's kinda similar to Typeform in terms of, like, you know, people will pick it up. You'll see, like, some users, like, picking up month and churn and then coming back and reactivating. I think we'll be able to tackle churn probably better than we can in in in Typeform because there is quite a lot of, like we we have, like, a a strong kind of usage based plan plans, which are based on minutes of [12:04] >> video processing. So we're typically seeing people buying more and more and more, so that's, like, indicating more and more usage. Plus, like, strong kind of like higher SMB enterprise means that like in terms of MRR churn, I think we will perform we will probably outperform our main product. [12:21] What is it at? [12:22] >> In terms of logo [12:23] What's it at today? Do you know what's at today? [12:25] >> The what? The yeah. Yeah. I think I think it's around 3%. Three or 4%. [12:33] That's actually not that is actually not horrible for this price point. [12:36] >> No. No. No. No. Mean, it's higher it's higher on time frame. This is typical of this of this kind of business. We see the same thing with like SurveyMonkey and all. Yep. It's just that people use these types of tools like periodically to do like campaigns and then they come back and so forth. [12:51] Are you in any talks to be acquired by SurveyMonkey? [12:54] >> No. No. But, you know, we did have those conversations. Not I have met with the SurveyMonkey CEO a couple of times. Just casual conversations. Oh, but that was way in the past. Just for fun. But no, no, nothing happening there, I can assure you. [13:14] Alright, well look, there's a relationship there so we'll see what happens. Now, your guys'last round of funding was when? [13:22] >> A while ago now. Yeah. Last series b with General Atlantic. [13:28] 2017 I think, right? Yeah. [13:32] >> I guess probably. [13:32] So any I mean, plans to raise or are you guys profitable? [13:38] >> We've we've been profitable. We're now kind of like just just happy to just stay around that. If we wanted to be be profitable more profitable, we could just slow down the investment and growth. Yeah, we have that well under control. [13:51] Yeah. Mean, you're you're in a I don't know if you know this, you probably do, but you're in a very rare club, right, where people that where they're and they have scale and their the ratio of funding Yeah. To ARR is about one to one. You know, most people at your scale, it's like [14:03] >> I I can tell you we have we we pretty much got the same amount in that we raised in capital. [14:10] Just sitting sitting in the bank? [14:12] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [14:14] What do you do with that? I mean, do you so so if you've got like $4,050,000,000 sitting in the bank, I mean, what the hell do you do with that? You just let it sit there? [14:19] >> No. Sorry. We've got what we raised in the last [14:22] Oh, '35. Yeah. But still same same question. Don't think doesn't General Atlantic go, what the hell are you guys doing? Why is the cash sitting in the bank? You gotta invest it. [14:30] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think, you know, you gotta spend it wisely. I I think we're you know, it's definitely, like, on the cards to think about, like, how we can, like, you know, open up some more opportunities. Who knows? There may be, like, room for for for another funding round round soon. I mean, it's a good environment to to raise capital in Mhmm. And the company's performing really well. So [14:57] What would you do this obviously isn't, you know, official, but using your gut I mean, what would you value the company at today? [15:04] >> What would I value the company at? [15:05] Yeah. What would you value at? [15:07] >> What would I do at it? Would say in the next three to six months, we we wish like based on yeah. Based on a multiple about 15, like, know, 800, I would say. [15:21] Yep. I mean, and if the video has thing takes off and does well, I mean, you could be passing [15:25] >> Well, that's obviously another good reason for an investor if if we were raising capital to pay ahead as well because there's obviously some new things that, you know, we can improve, have some traction and we can say we can repeat this model again. So Yeah. Definitely [15:41] >> definitely yeah, the future is looking great. [15:44] And when you raised the 35,000,000 a couple of years ago, what valuation was that at? [15:49] >> Oi, much less. [15:53] >> Was it I think it was around 300 or something. Yeah. So I don't know. [15:58] Fascinating story, and this is really interesting because I can tell you're like a pro you're you're someone that can really do anything at the company. It sounds like you write code, you design, you talk to users, you're probably talking to investors too. [16:07] >> Well, it's it's just what I really enjoy. [16:10] But I I just, you know, I'm, you know, I've [16:13] >> come to learn them. I'm actually a builder and I need to be a builder and stuff. And the further away I get from that, the less the less I feel kind of motivated or or yeah. I just like being close to customers I bet. And and solving problems, I guess. [16:28] David, we love that about you. Let's wrap it here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. [16:32] >> So what do you think [16:34] about me? [16:34] >> I don't read business books. [16:36] Any book. Any book. [16:37] >> I read book? Let's see. He's [16:40] pulling from his bookshelf. What's he gonna pull? [16:42] >> Anything from anything from Bill Bryson. [16:44] Bill Bryson. Alright. Number two, is there a founder you're following or studying? No. [16:51] >> I'm not studying a founder. [16:52] Number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building video asking type form? [16:58] >> Figma and Studio Code to work in the app. [17:03] Number four. How many hours of sleep do eat every night? [17:06] >> Last night, four. Nice. Very good. [17:08] Four you can't survive on four hours of sleep? [17:10] >> No. No. Don't. It was just last night. It was a bit of a shit show. But, no, generally, like, six, seven, something like that. [17:20] What happened last night? Why was [17:21] >> it a shit show? We had a a problem with Lambda. It's really boring. With Lambda functions timing out and some of our video process and pipeline were affected during the night. So I was actually there just with an engineer trying well, I wasn't doing the engineering, but just just kind of supportive [17:40] Coffee runs. Solution. Yeah. Alright. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [17:47] >> I have I'm married and three kids. [17:49] Wow. Busy guy. How old are you? [17:52] >> I'm 44. 44. [17:54] David, take us home here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [17:59] >> Everything's gonna be cool. [18:01] Guys, Typeform founded back in 2011. They've now scaled over a 40,000,000 run rate. They launched their video ask product, a new product back in 2019 in beta. They did 1,400,000 in terms of run rate in 2020, opened a three x that year in 2021 as they look to scale. They did a $35,000,000 round of financing back in 2017. I called a $300,000,000 valuation. David says, know, it feels like 800,000,000 is very doable right now at the [18:24] growth rate. We will see what happens, but no current plans to raise healthy economics and very profitable. David, thanks for taking [18:29] >> us to the top. Cheers, Nathan. [18:33] One 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, 1PM [18:57] 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, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [19:19] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up for [19:40] that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We gotta [19:58] push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.

[00:00] Hello, everyone. My guest today is David Okenev. He was born in Belgium and later educated in England and started his professional career as a musician. Expression through music soon turned to expression through product and brand design, which led David to founding the Barcelona based design studio, Fat Man Collective. From working in the same co working space, he later met his cofounder, Robert, and the two cofounded Typeform. Today, he's joint CEO and sweats over everything vision, product, [00:25] and design related. David, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:27] >> Yep. [00:28] Alright. Well, first off, fat man fat man collective. You don't you don't look that fat. Where did the name come from? [00:34] >> Well, the idea was to put together a a collective of designers, and altogether, we'd make this kind of fat man. But, yeah, no one was fat. In fact, the first designer that I had in the in the collective was, like, this skinny. So yeah. [00:49] So look. Sometimes parody like that works. Right? Fat man collective led by a really skinny guy or gal at works. [00:54] >> Yeah. Yeah. Alright. I wasn't that skinny. [00:57] Tell me [00:58] >> the first design. [00:58] Some of the most successful software companies that I see today actually came out of agencies because the agents in an agency, you can see all customers have the same problem, and then you build software for that. Was that the pattern you followed? [01:11] >> You mean, like, 37 signals? [01:12] Like, so many of them. Yeah. [01:16] >> Yeah. I mean, we we happen to be an agency, and I think in an agency, the thing you have is that you kind of have to deal with a lot of clients on a day to day basis and do a kind of context switching the whole time into other projects. So I guess it drives people to think, I I'd love to just be able to focus on one project and just have, like, customers instead of clients. [01:38] >> And I think in our case, that's that that was one of the driving factors. [01:41] That's right. So tell people that are not familiar, what does Typeform do, and how do you generate revenue? Is it a pure play SaaS company? [01:48] >> Yeah. It's a it's a SaaS it's a SaaS play. It's a premium product. What we do is allow people to create conversational forms essentially. So you have your your, you know, your your standard web forms. They're not very interactive. What we do is split the each question into kind of a conversational format presented in a better UI with you know, allows you to also, like, add your brand, add interactive elements like video, [02:19] >> images, and so forth. [02:20] Yep. And when when you look at folks that are paying you again, give me a general sense. What are they paying you per average per month or each month? [02:27] >> Yeah. It's the ASP is around $40 a month. [02:30] Okay. And are these that's kind of for each user, or are you actually selling kind of enterprise bulk deal plans as well? [02:36] >> We do some enterprise. We're not an enterprise source. So we don't go out there trying to land enterprise clients. We we just we have some enterprises that would that wanna come on to Typeform. Our sales team is about three people. So Okay. It's it's very much self-service. [02:49] That's great. And what's the total team size? [02:52] >> We're now a 190. [02:53] One ninety. All all in Spain? [02:56] >> No. We have an office in San Francisco as well, building out a small team out there, working on partnerships. We have kind of a platform play, which we're rolling out this this year, so we want to be close to the partner ecosystem. [03:10] Tell tell me more about that. What does platform play mean? [03:13] >> Yeah. So we figured out that we can't cover every use case with Typeform, but we have a kind of interface which people can use for conversational data collection. And then we wanna partner up with companies that wanna integrate with that. So, you know, pushing our data into their platform or even partners that want to build directly into the into our creation process. [03:35] And what have you kind of with kind of this goal in mind, right, it continuing obviously to expand via the platform, what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers using you? [03:45] >> Total customer around 40,000 plus we have a bunch of free customers as well. [03:49] So this is an interesting dynamic. There's very few people that have successfully kind of monetized the freemium model, right? You're I don't know how many freemium users you have and what the percentage conversion rate is, but 40,000 converting to paid is obviously no small number. The question I have for you, how do you decide when to make people start paying? [04:08] >> Are you asking, like, from the start, like, when you start off the business? I mean [04:13] My audience my oh, I'll tell you my audience a lot of times, I'll say, Nathan, we have a product that's based off, like, some amount of usage, but we don't know when to show the paywall. Right? How did you make that decision? [04:24] >> So we took our time. We launched the product 2013. We spent a year, in what we called a beta, but I think we just called it beta because we weren't weren't charging at the time. After a year, we got we rolled out the the the the payment plan. It was just one one plan called the pro plan. [04:46] >> I guess it was just time to start monetizing, but we weren't we weren't really soft. Like, we didn't put a lot of the features we didn't put a lot of the features behind the paywall. We still, like, kind of left a generous helping for for free users. Mhmm. [05:00] But what is so is there a usage metric? Is it after you've collected a 100 entries in a given month, you're shown a paywall? How do you get the We [05:06] >> do have that. But initially, what we started with was just feature based. [05:11] I see. [05:12] >> So one of the things we did, for example, if you wanted to, like, customize the thank you screen or use logic inside your form or the calculation feature, then we show we we would show the paywall there. We also have another dimension, which is we have this pro plus plan where we sell seats as well. [05:30] Yep. Yeah. Well, that's in $60 a month. Right? [05:32] >> Exactly. So you can create a shared workspace and, you know, collaborate with people on creating type forms. [05:37] That's great. I mean, now can I do the math? 40,000 folks times that $40 ARPU. You guys are north of 1,600,000 a month today. Right? [05:44] >> You're a good mathematician. [05:46] Well, no. [05:46] >> I wanna [05:46] give you I wanna give you I wanna give you credit. My research team has a note here that says they found something, I think, on Novo brief in 2015 that you guys had passed 8,000,000 forms per month, growing 20% month over month, half a million users, and monthly revenue around €200,000. You're now much bigger than that. [06:02] >> Yeah. We're bigger than I think it's half a million users. That's probably the sign ups at the time. But, yeah, we're we're roughly in in that neighborhood. [06:09] That's great. Talk to me about funding decisions. So are you bootstrapped? Or have you raised? And if you've raised, how much? [06:14] >> No. We've done few rounds. We've done four rounds. We stayed bootstrapped for a while because we had resources from our design agencies, which were like kind of pumping into Typeform. So we managed to stay, you know, the first year without any any without raising. In total, we've done four rounds, as I mentioned, and we raised $52,000,000 so far. [06:37] And what I mean, I know some of the obviously the folks you have involved are also people that serve the same kind of customer like obviously Squarespace. Right? So how did you decide who to take funding from and and how to build the syndicates? [06:51] >> So we tried to raise capital in Spain. That didn't happen early on. They told us we weren't we didn't know how to run a business. They were completely correct. [07:01] Who was they? [07:02] >> I don't wanna mention any names, but some local VCs [07:06] I [07:06] >> basically see. Told us we were too green, wet behind the ears to actually, run a startup. But we had a really good product and eventually, a German VC called well, so it was a German and Polish VC. It was RTA Ventures and Point Nine Capital actually saw the product and thought, wow, There's something here. So they they knew we had no idea how to run a business, but they invested in any case. But they taught us [07:33] >> a lot about, you know, you know, about SaaS. I mean, to be honest, we I didn't even know what a KPI was to start off with or even MRR. So so our early investors really helped us. We did another bridge round with, with Connect Ventures, and then, Index Ventures came in for our series a. And, really, I mean, we we had Index Ventures at the back of our mind. We knew, like, they were, you know, one [07:58] >> of two really important firms in Europe, and we knew that, you know, getting them would kind of help us give give our brand more visibility and and more attention in markets. [08:08] The KPI story is a funny one. I remember my first ever meeting with potential investors, we sit down at the table and David, they look at me and they go, well, Nathan, where's ARPU? And I'm going, we don't have anyone named ARPU on the team. [08:21] And I'm like, oh, average revenue per user, you're asking for a data set. Okay. [08:27] >> And there's many ways to say ARPU as well. [08:29] Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. [08:31] >> It's very confusing. So talk [08:33] to me real quick, but I before I dive kinda more into your story, wanna talk more about your how you kind of gamified internally AB testing with Mad Gambler and some other growth tactics you've used. Growth rate today, what are you at? So if you're doing kinda 1.6 today, taking back a year, what were you doing? [08:47] >> We're kind of floating around with we're aiming to double year on year at the moment. So we're kind of [08:54] >> following this unicorn path. [08:56] Yeah. That's great. So, I mean, is it fair to say about it June 2017, you're doing somewhere around 800 k a month? [09:01] >> June A year ago? [09:05] >> Yeah. More or less. [09:06] Yeah. That that would put you on the double track. [09:08] >> Yeah. [09:08] What what makes I mean, obviously, once you get bigger and bigger, doubling becomes trickier. And this price point also s m yeah. SMB space churn is always always tough. How have you managed churn? [09:19] >> Yeah. Yeah. It gets, well, it's it's it's difficult. I mean, it's it's just an upward battle, and you have to just work at it the whole time. But, I mean, what what we're doing right now is trying to, like, increase activation to to to combat that. It's it's kind of like, churn is a long term thing, and it takes a lot of time to kind of hit at that, so you can't just change that overnight. So [09:40] >> you have to, like, build more more sticky use cases, find better ways for people to stay in the funnel. So we're kind of just very, very focused right now on just, like, activating as many people as possible. So so working kind of top of the funnel. [09:52] What are you hovering around right now? [09:55] >> In terms of churns? [09:56] Yeah. [09:58] >> Yeah. Around the 5% mark. [10:00] Okay. That's not horrible. So 5% gross logo churn [10:02] >> per month? At this scale, it's, you know, it's it's it's tough. Yeah. Yep. You know, if we didn't have have churn, then we wouldn't have so much pressure in terms of, like, adding new users every month. [10:13] That's right. Yeah. Five five percent five percent of 40,000 can get big. [10:18] >> Yeah. But but by the way, some of these users that churn, they reactivate. We have a lot of serial reactivators in Typhoon because people come in, they do a Typhoon, they churn, then the next Typhoon, so they come back. So that's kind of the cyclical thing that happens. [10:29] How much time do you spend, like, just sweating over, gosh, how do we make it so that these people stop canceling every other month and then reactivating? Can't we provide some part of the product that makes them sticky in between? How much time do you spend thinking about that? [10:42] >> A lot of time. I think our future strategy is is is aligned to that. I think it's it's it's all about understanding what is the job to be done that people are using Typeform for and really packaging packaging that in a much more compelling way for them. At the moment, people come into Typeform, and it's kind of this open playing field. I can do all sorts of stuff. But really, like, packaging those ideas together into real [11:03] >> kind of mini products, I think, is gonna be key for us. [11:08] So right now today, you've talked you've mentioned the word activation, you know, many times already. What do you know you've gotta get a new user to do in the first couple hours they sign up or log in so that they become sticky over the long term? [11:20] >> Well, we need to get them to create a form for starters, and then our activation metric is is they collect five five results. [11:30] Over what time period? [11:32] >> First seven days. [11:33] First seven. Okay. Good. So so five five new kind of leads or inputs in the first seven days? [11:37] >> That's our that's our activation metric. [11:39] That's great. You I I don't know if this is true or not, but when you talk about conversational marketing, the reason a lot of people have trouble building product around it is you have so many variants of if people are typing entries, they could say anything. And so how do you make meaning of an anything response? My question to you is what does your tech team look like and how much really, like, hard tech is behind [11:59] processing the natural language people are putting in these forms? [12:02] >> That's not something that we're doing yet. Okay. But definitely something that we need to look at. So but all about making the product smarter. Essentially, right now, we just show you what people have said. [12:12] That's [12:13] >> it. We're not doing that interpretation for you. [12:15] Interesting. Okay. Last two go ahead. [12:18] >> One thing one thing to just add, like, type type form, we see ourselves as a system in system of engagement, as opposed to a system of record. Although we do record the information, it's really about, you know, people come to us because they really care about the interactions that they're having with their customers or their employees, and we really we really play well in that space. So, typically, people download the data and plug it into other [12:39] >> areas and then analyze it in other places. So you could run l l NLP on our dataset just by integrating with a different service. [12:46] How many forms now are you processing per month? [12:52] >> So there is I think it's probably now 50,000,000 unique landings a month on on on on forms. [13:00] Five zero? [13:01] >> But that's unique 50,000,000. [13:03] Yeah. Five zero, not one five. [13:05] >> Yeah. Yeah. Five zero landing on type forms every month. [13:09] That's great. And then obviously, your your the things you focus on are how many of those 50 then go and complete one question, two questions in full completion. [13:16] >> Yeah. And actually, that's what drives a lot of our business. There's this viral loop going on, they land on a form, they click powered by Typeform, then they create a Typeform distributed with their audience and so forth. [13:26] You ran and documented a pretty sophisticated kind of testing variants on that powered by metric. Talk to me about that test. How'd you how'd you set up the test, and how'd you make sure the results were indicative? [13:39] >> I I don't have all the technical details, but essentially, what we did is is test a lot of different copies in the buttons in the powered by button, and also test going to, like, the landing page versus directly to sign up and and did did multivariate tests between mobile and desktop as well in that same manner. [13:58] And what have you gotten CAC down to today? What are paying to acquire customers? [14:05] >> We're trying to improve that. We're not quite there in terms of the three to one. It depends how you how you read it as well because, you know, like like like many early stage companies, our attribution model is still quite immature. We're working on on improving that. But, yeah, it depends where you look look at that. We have depends on which pocket you look at. Somewhere above three to one CAC, somewhere a bit underneath. [14:30] Yeah. Do you assume if you have a 5% logo churn per month, that means the average customer would stay caught for twenty months at $40. It's an $800 LTV. Is that the LTV you assume when you talk about your LTV to CAC ratio? [14:43] >> It's roughly around that. [14:45] Yeah. Okay. Roughly. So what I hear you saying then is sometimes you might might spend half that, which is higher than what you want. Sometimes it might be way below that depending on the cohort you're attracting. [14:52] >> It depends what you're doing as well. Like, with with pure branding stuff, like, it's really hard to measure. But you you you invest because, you know, if you get your brand out there, you know, there there could be some effect. [15:04] Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, David. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [15:11] >> Favorite business book? One that comes to mind is that Jason Fried one. I can't remember the name. [15:18] Re rework? [15:18] >> Yeah. Really. Yeah. [15:20] Good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? [15:25] >> If CEO I'm following or studying, no. [15:27] Number number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own? [15:34] >> I'm a big fan of Mailchimp. Been trying Wix recently, actually. Found it quite quite quite usable. [15:43] How does Anthony how does Anthony feel about that? [15:45] >> I'm sure he'll be fine. I I think Squarespace is a is a great thing. Sorry. But, yeah, I was I I always thought really badly of them, and I've been trying it recently, and I I was pretty impressed. [15:58] Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [16:04] >> Yeah. Seven. [16:05] Something like good. And what's your situation? Married, single, you have kiddos? [16:08] >> About to get married. [16:09] Oh, congrats. That's good. No kids. That's exciting. [16:13] >> I have kids. I have two kids. [16:15] Two kids. Okay. Very good. And how old are you, David? [16:18] >> How old am I? Yeah. I'm 41 now. [16:20] 41. Alright. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew? [16:24] >> Oh, Jesus. [16:30] >> Know that everything's gonna be okay. [16:32] Guys, it will all be okay. This is coming from a guy that named his agency, Fatman Collective, because he's putting a bunch of people together, right, and it's gonna end up working out. What ended up happening is or sorry, yeah, Fatman Collective. What ended up happening was he saw the same need across many things, wanted to double down instead of changing between clients every day. Started building a Typeform with his co founder David, or sorry Robert, [16:52] and now today they're serving over 50,000,000 unique landing pages on a Typeform every single month. That's up from just eight a couple years ago. They've also scaled revenue about a year ago doing $800 per month in revenue. Now almost double that 1.6 across 40,000 users using them. So healthy, lots of growth tactics, lots of good stories here. Over $50,000,000 raised to help drive that growth healthy economics. David, thank you for taking us to the top. [17:15] >> Pleasure.