SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
976 How JotForm Passed 3m Users, $45m in ARR Without Raising Capital
27 Mar 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. 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 Steve Hartert.
He is the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer at JotForm.com with responsibility for marketing programs, brand management, and corporate partnerships. Prior to joining JotForm, he was president of Hartert & Associates, a marketing consultancy that worked with B2B and B2C companies. Steve has more than 25 years of marketing management experience. Steve, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, I am. Let's go.
All right. So JotForm gave you a big, juicy chunk of equity to convince you to leave your own company and join them, right? Yes, they did. Yeah. Tell us what JotForm does and what's the revenue model? How do you make money?
Sure. I mean, what we are is we're online form builder, you know, previous to our system. If you wanted to build a
build forms you had to be a programmer you had to be a coder and forms can be quite complicated what we what we developed was the very first drag and drop interface as a sas product where somebody could just literally say i want these fields i want first name last name i want address i want i want to get a payment to whatever other fields they want and they can create online forms it's very simple very very easy to do and what's the business model is it a sas play
Yes, we're very much a SaaS play. What we have is we have a free product so people can test drive it as long as they want. But as they, you know, as their needs grow and they need more forms or they need more features, we have tiered paid products that appeal to various levels of companies.
That's great. And give us a sense. I don't want to go down every single cohort because I'm sure you have many. What's the average customer paying you per month, would you say?
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Chapter 2: What is JotForm and how does it generate revenue?
What have you grown to now over the two years you've been there? What are you guys at right now in terms of total customers using you guys?
I mean, total customers, the growth has been over 50%. When I came on board, we had just crossed the 2 million mark. So it took us about 10 years to go from zero to 2 million users. And in really the last 18, 19 months, we've been able to add 50% more user base. And we're actually in that. If you look at our growth, it was very slow and steady. And then for the last, say, 18 months,
It's climbing big time. So the hockey stick is starting to very much happen for us.
That's great. I want to talk more about that. But just to be clear, all of those 3 million are paying, they're all paying customers or they're just free users?
There's a mix of paid and used. Paid and free, I should say. Paid and free.
Okay. Can you give us a general idea of how many folks are actually paying for the platform?
Uh, that one, I'm going to have to kind of hold that card fairly close, but it's, uh, it's, we're above industry average.
Let's just put it that way. Okay. And you'll have to educate us because I just don't know what it, I mean, is industry average 5% of users, 10%, 20% of users paying?
It's about six and a half to 7% is average. And when you have a freemium model like what we have, uh, but I say our user base, our paid user basis is beyond that.
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Chapter 3: How has JotForm achieved significant user growth?
So they've grown over the past 12 months from about $2.9 million a month in revenue generally to over $4.5 million. Steve's driving churn down from 5% to monthly logo churn, focused on driving that down. Super healthy economics right now. They're spending less than $20 to acquire new customers with a 36-month lifetime value at $25 a month. That's $900 in LTV revenue.
Again, less than 20 bucks in CAC, so healthy there. Payback period happens in the first month, which is great. Their team of 75, based in San Francisco in their remote offices, focused on making online forms significantly easier. Steve, thank you for taking us to the top.
Oh, thanks for the opportunity.