How Typeform Reached $935M Valuation and 130,000 Customers While Spinning Up New Products with a 2-Person R&D Team (Interview with Co-founder David Okuniev)

Introduction and David's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is David Okuniev. If you listen to the show, you know we've had Typeform on many times. Last time David and I spoke, he was launching Typeform's official second product VideoAsk. He's now on to something more exciting. We're gonna talk about it today. David, are you ready to take us to the top?

David Okuniev

00:13>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

00:14Alright. So you're just like you just like going from zero to one. Right? You're like, once it breaks a million

00:18in revenue, you get bored, you move on to the next product.

David Okuniev

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.

Nathan Latka

00:29So pick up where we left off with VideoAsk, and 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?

David Okuniev

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 VideoAsk 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 developer,

01:04>> and, yeah, we're we're actually about to release it well, start to beta release it with a few people. So yeah. Excited.

Nathan Latka

01:12This is great. Okay. There's a bunch of stuff to unpack here. So I guess first off, you left VideoAsk when it broke 3,000,000 in revenues. Did anything change Before about like that.

David Okuniev

01:21>> Before. Something. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:23And 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?

David Okuniev

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.

Introducing Relayed: Async Audio and Meeting Insights

Nathan Latka

01:49Mhmm. 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.

David Okuniev

01:56>> This is the space for now. There's 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,

02:26>> essentially.

Nathan Latka

02:27So what's the name of the product?

Relayed Product Vision and Beta Launch

David Okuniev

02:29>> It's called Relayed or Relayed, however you wanna spell it. Sorry. Pronounce it. Relayed.ai. 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.

Beta Waitlist and Early Traction

Nathan Latka

02:52How many how what's on the how many on the beta list right now?

David Okuniev

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 we'll get a few more people in and Typeform will promote it as well, so we'll we'll start pushing it. But it's been it's been pretty much under wraps up up till now.

Typeform's $135M Series C and $935M Valuation

Nathan Latka

03:13So I think 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?

David Okuniev

03:23>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

03:24That that was pre money or post?

David Okuniev

03:26>> Post money valuation.

Nathan Latka

03:27Okay. Post. So flirting with sort of unicorn-ish status. And last time you came on the show, I mean, you said ARR was right around 48,000,000 in ARR. I what? You guys are, like, 70 now. Right?

David Okuniev

03:38>> A bit bit bit more than that.

Nathan Latka

03:39Bit more. So, like, the fact that you've sort of and and you were one of the original founders. Right?

David Okuniev

03:44>> Yeah. Yeah. We're two co founders.

Nathan Latka

03:47Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:10your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:34get 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 this is

04:56not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

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Running a 2-Person R&D Team Inside Typeform

Nathan Latka

06:10the 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.

David Okuniev

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 and we make a duo basically in the company and we're splitting up these new products. I mean, just just to go

06:58>> back 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 VideoAsk, and now I'm doing Relayed.

Nathan Latka

07:44That'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?

David Okuniev

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 VideoAsk, 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 engineer 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.

Nathan Latka

08:40And 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?

David Okuniev

08:49>> Nothing systematic. Just the same way that Typeform was built and VideoAsk was built. We just wanted to make more human interactions around data collection, so that's Typeform and and VideoAsk. Relayed 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 thought a purely conversational tool 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.

Nathan Latka

09:43And if relayed takes off and and works out perfectly, what does the world look like in two to three years?

David Okuniev

09:49>> In terms of?

Nathan Latka

09:51Well, if everyone's using Relayed. Right? Let's say your vision of what it should be works and gets adopted. What does the world look like?

David Okuniev

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.

Why Build Inside Typeform Rather Than Spin Out

Nathan Latka

11:15And David, I mean, you're selling this. People are getting excited listening. Maybe a question they're thinking is, wait, why is David building this inside of Typeform? Why not spin it out as its own thing? Why is that?

David Okuniev

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.

Customer Count and Profitability Discussion

Nathan Latka

11:58Yep. And how many customers across the whole company? Say I think last to make you mind, you guys were breaking 100,000.

David Okuniev

12:04>> I don't have the latest numbers on top of my head.

12:08>> Must be 130, 40, not sure the latest numbers. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

12:13A 130, that's great. And then

12:17you were very proud last time you came on, still profitable. It's gonna be hard to say profitable when you raise $135,000,000

David Okuniev

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.

Series C Timing, Secondary, and Investor Details

Nathan Latka

12:53Yeah. 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?

David Okuniev

13:09>> I'm I I can't disclose. Can

Nathan Latka

13:14you give a more or less than 50 percent? Can you give a range?

David Okuniev

13:16>> It was it was much less than 50%.

Nathan Latka

13:19Much 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?

David Okuniev

13:32>> We did that in the last round before. We didn't actually do this on on on this round. Okay. It was oversubscribed.

Nathan Latka

13:40So so secondary in terms of this round is more like early investors selling their stake or founders taking some money off the table?

David Okuniev

13:46>> There's a combination of both, yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:48Yeah, yeah, okay. But just to be clear, the series B you did back in 2017, you said

David Okuniev

13:52>> We did 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.

Nathan Latka

14:04Yeah. In terms of in term when you say what they had, what what they what they had already vested. Right?

David Okuniev

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.

Nathan Latka

14:15And 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?

David Okuniev

14:25>> That's not my ambition, but let's see. Let's see where 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.

Nathan Latka

14:49Did you guys have term sheets before sort of a downturn above a billion dollar valuation? Or

David Okuniev

14:55>> Yeah. The timing was quite good, I have to say.

Nathan Latka

14:59For for the the timing was good for them or for you?

David Okuniev

15:01>> For for us. For us. We we yeah. It happened just before the downturn.

Nathan Latka

15:08Okay. 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.

David Okuniev

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.

Nathan Latka

15:26Yeah. No. That's great. Any strategic partners in the round?

David Okuniev

15:31>> As in, like, smaller angels.

Nathan Latka

15:33Who who led? Who led the 135?

David Okuniev

15:35>> Sofina, 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.

Nathan Latka

15:51That'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 asynchronous. 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.

David Okuniev

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 see.

Nathan Latka

16:31And 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?

Why Not Acquire an Existing Tool

David Okuniev

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.

Nathan Latka

16:57No technical debt to deal with. No customer transition. None of that stuff.

David Okuniev

17:01>> Yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

17:02Alright, David. Let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, what's the last book that you read?

David Okuniev

17:08>> Humankind. Humankind.

Nathan Latka

17:10Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

David Okuniev

17:14>> No. Not studying anyone.

Nathan Latka

17:16Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building do Relayed.

David Okuniev

17:23>> Well, just coding really. Use Figma to design and coding in React and bunch of other technologies.

Nathan Latka

17:33And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

David Okuniev

17:36>> At the moment, not too bad. Like, seven hours.

Nathan Latka

17:40It's pretty good. And what situation? Married, single, kids?

David Okuniev

17:43>> I'm married. Got kids.

Nathan Latka

17:44Still three kids?

David Okuniev

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

Nathan Latka

17:58Three kiddos. That's great. Did you celebrate a birthday? Are you 40, 45 now or still 44?

David Okuniev

18:02>> I'm 45. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:0445. Very good. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

David Okuniev

18:08>> Sorry?

Nathan Latka

18:09Something you wish you knew back when you were 20.

Advice for 20-Year-Old Self and Wrap-Up

David Okuniev

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.

Nathan Latka

18:24You're remarkably consistent. Figma was the same. Kids were the same. The twenty-year-old advice is the same.

David Okuniev

18:29>> Yes.

18:30>> I'm I'm done with having more kids. That's for sure.

Nathan Latka

18:34Fair enough. Guys, they're already here to David, co founder of Typeform launched in 2011, broke a million dollars in revenue back in, call it 2014. Now up above $70,000,000 in ARR, 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 Relayed. Just him and another engineer inside of Typeform. They're launching the beta here shortly after David posted about it on LinkedIn

18:57and 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.

David Okuniev

19:02>> Okay. Thanks.

Nathan Latka

19:05One 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

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