SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1252 Typeform Now At $19m ARR, 50m Forms Each Month, 40,000 Customers
28 Dec 2018
Chapter 1: What is David Okuniev's background and how did he start Typeform?
They will all be okay. This is coming from a guy that named his agency, the Fat Man Collective, because he's putting a bunch of people together, right? And it's going to end up working out. What ended up happening is, or sorry, yeah, Fat Man 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 type form with his co-founder, David, or sorry, Robert. And now today- They're serving over 50 million kind of unique landing pages on a type form every single month. That's up from just eight a couple of years ago. They've also scaled revenue about a year ago, doing 800 grand 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 million raised to help drive that growth, healthy economics. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich... or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines.
We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of any IPOs. We're a bit strapped.
Chapter 2: How did Typeform grow to 50 million forms per month?
We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is David Okuniev. 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 co-founder, Robert, and the two co-founded Typeform. Today, he's joint CEO and sweats over everything vision, product, and design related.
David, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. Well, first off, Fat Man Collective, you don't look that fat. Where'd the name come from?
Well, the idea was to put together a collective of designers and all together we'd make this kind of fat man. But yeah, no one was fat. In fact, the first designer that I had in the collective was like this skinny. So yeah.
Look, sometimes parody like that works, right? Fat Man Collective led by a really skinny guy or gal, it works.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I wasn't that skinny.
So tell me, some of the most successful software companies that I see today actually came out of agencies because 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?
You mean like 37 Signals?
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Chapter 3: What is Typeform's revenue model and how do they generate income?
We have a lot of serial reactivators in Typeform because people come in, they do a Typeform, they churn, then the next Typeform, so they come back. So there's kind of this cyclical thing.
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?
A lot of time. I think our future strategy is aligned to that. I think it's all about understanding what is the job to be done that people are using Typeform for and really 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 kind of mini products, I think is going to be key for us.
So right now today, you've mentioned the word activation many times already. What do you know you've got to 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?
Well, we need to get them to create a form for starters. And then our activation metric is they collect five results.
Over what time period? Uh, first seven days. First seven. Okay, good. So, so five, five new kind of leads or inputs in the first seven days.
That's our activation metric.
That's great. You, um, 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?
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Chapter 4: What are the future plans for Typeform and its platform play?
Sometimes it might be way below that depending on the cohort you're attracting.
It depends what you're doing as well. Like with pure branding stuff, like it's really hard to measure. But you invest because you know if you get your brand out there, you know, there could be some effect.
Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Let's wrap up here with the famous five, David. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Favorite business book. One that comes to mind is that Jason Freed one. I can't remember the name. Rework?
Yeah, I really like that one. Good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
CEO I'm following or studying?
No. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own?
I'm a big fan of MailChimp. Uh, I've been trying Wix recently, actually. I found it quite usable.
How does Anthony feel about that?
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