SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
PLG Playbook: How Jotform hit 10m Users, Targeting 5% Free to Paid, Min $19/mo Price Point, Bootstrapped
23 Jul 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Before you guys broke $40 million in ARR, you're over $100 million now today, right?
I can't comment on revenue.
Those are public. That $100 million number you guys put out in a press release, I believe. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Steve Hartert.
He's the Vice President of Enterprise Operations at JotForm with responsibilities that include marketing, brand, and corporate partnerships. Before JotForm, he was President at Hartert & Associates, a marketing consultancy that worked with B2B and B2C SaaS companies.
He's got more than 30 years of experience in this space with companies like the Walt Disney Company, Ministry of Transport in Australia, and Blue Cross CA. All right, JotForm.com. Steve, you ready to take us to the top? Let's go for it. Now, just so you understand the origin story here, you were not an original co-founder, right? How did you get involved? What year?
I've been with JobForms since March of 2016. That's when I started working here. I started off in the marketing side, helping them build up the marketing department as a CMO. And then about, I guess about four years ago now, we decided we wanted to start up a new division for enterprise and was kind of asked to head up that part of it.
And as that grew, I kind of had to leave the marketing side alone and then kind of move over to help grow this new division. And so I think if you looked at the headcount, I'm going to say I'm probably in the first 50 employees that were hired for the company. So I've seen this grow from where we were to we're closing in on 400 employees now.
That's incredible. And just to put that in revenue terms, you joined before you guys broke $40 million in ARR. You're over $100 million now today, right?
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Chapter 2: How did Steve Hartert get involved with JotForm?
And the benefit of things like the video is they have very long shelf lives. I mean, those things can last several years as far as an item goes versus
something like just say an article that could be posted the shelf life might be just a couple of months and then that gets kind of archived but video lives forever basically that makes sense okay so there's a video playbook here there's an seo playbook here what does your seo team look like today or and is it in-house or outsourced it's all internally so how many folks did you say are on that team and what are sort of the roles look like
Well, I mean, we've got a couple of dozen people that are doing on the SEO site, but I mean, really what it comes down to is they look at, they're constantly pouring over the keywords that people are looking at, how they're finding us, what types of phrases they're looking for, not only just in a general sense, but also based on a regional type of situation.
So from different geographies that we're looking at, people say in the Middle East versus the EU versus North America versus Asia or the APAC region, those types of things. we kind of build our SEO around those types of locations. And so we can actually kind of identify little pockets of populations that are looking for specific types of forms.
And then around that, then we can wrap content around that that helps address those SEO components.
Yep. And when you, I actually, you were right. It was back in 2017 when we last spoke. So a while ago, you had told me that customers could get on an average. We're paying about 300 bucks a month for jot form. Has that stayed pretty consistent? Is the ARPU still about 300 bucks a year?
Again, I'm not going to comment specific dollars on revenue, but I mean, our revenue bases continue to grow as we've added on top of this.
I'm not asking about revenue. I'm talking about if someone listening right now, I'm trying to help them market here. If someone listening right now wants to use JotForm, what are they going to probably pay on average per month?
Well, I mean, again, it can use our single plans or what we call our bronze silver gold plans, which are our single user plans. And those are listed on the website. They go anywhere high as $99 a month to $39 a month for our bronze plans. And if they want to move up to our enterprise plans, again, there's a minimum of five users on that.
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Chapter 3: What strategies has JotForm used to achieve significant revenue growth?
You know, you just don't have a lot of demand, but it works for you. But then again, as your business grows or as your organization grows and then you can just move up the plan ladder if that's what you need to do.
And how many submissions per form do you allow on the free plan?
You get 100 per form.
So if you have five forms, 100 submission sheets, it's 500 submissions basically is the max.
Well, yeah, in total. But I mean, you get 100 per form. So if that form hits its 100, then it's basically that form kind of caps out for that month for you.
I see. I see. And is that the most... I mean, when you look at your no-touch sales model, is it really that? It's people hit that 100 mark and then they convert no-touch...
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because once they hit that, they'll log in and they'll get just a display pops up. They're logged into our system. Then they'll get a display that says, hey, you've reached your maximum number of submissions for the month. To continue, you need to upgrade to what would be our bronze plan. And then at that point, if they say yes, they can do it.
Otherwise, they can say, well, you know what, I'll just go ahead and I'll start deleting out some of those older submissions from earlier. of the month or I'll export out a bunch of things or something. So it depends on how the user wants to do it.
But we find that most people, once they get to that point, they realize this has become a valuable tool for their business and the path for them to upgrade. They look at it and think this is a key component so they don't have a problem wanting to do an upgrade at that
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Chapter 4: What is JotForm's approach to bootstrapping and organic growth?
a higher valuation and less dilution, which is the name of the game, less dilution. Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Well, what is that barometer?
Maybe this isn't specific to JotForm specifically, but when you look at Typeform, others in the space, and other just, frankly, PLG tools that have a big freemium plan, what do you, as a guy that just studies marketing, like to see in terms of what you consider a good free-to-paid conversion rate? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%?
Well, I think everybody wants to get it higher than they can. I mean, a good 5% is about the industry average, it seems like. And I'm talking about all SaaS products, not just in the form world. But a 5% conversion rate seems to be pretty solid for people. And it varies. Some people can be even smaller because they could be down to one quarter.
But what they're trying to do is get as many people under the pipe. So they're doing it on a volume basis. But about a 5% conversion rate. I think it's about the industry average. We look at that to see how do we stack up against that industry. And again, it varies.
Chapter 5: How does JotForm leverage SEO in its marketing strategy?
Some months are better than others and some months, but everybody seems to kind of bubble along that certain 5% threshold.
But true or false, if you had six months go by where you were at 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, would you change something about the freemium paywall to try and get back up above 5%?
No, not necessarily. I mean, we would look at it and go, is this thing that, is it just a certain industry? Is it some other kind of economic condition? Is it, you know, what would be causing that?
But the point is, we don't want to sit there and keep kind of adjusting that threshold because then it becomes confusing to our customers because they'll say, wait a second, last month it was this, this month it's that. And now you've got people all over the place on different kinds of tiers. And that just leads to a lot of confusion for people.
Yeah. Now, I believe you guys did celebrate publicly on your blog. Well, first off, when you joined, how many total users? Because you just celebrated a 10 million milestone, right? Do you remember what the growth is?
As far as what do you mean growth?
When you joined in 2016? Yeah. No, no, no. With just users, what you guys already published, right? So when you joined in 2016, what was the total number of users?
We were probably around... I want to say we're probably, I think we had just done about 3 million users.
Okay. Wow. And then you guys celebrated 9 million, I believe in 2020, and you announced 10 million here this year. Is that correct? Correct. That's great. And so is that sort of the goal for this year? Just keep adding a million new users per year?
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