SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Typeform On Steroids Hits $50k in MRR up from $20k 1 year Ago
13 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. Guys, buildarray.com. Think of it like an enterprise version of Typeform. They've got their biggest customer paying almost a quarter million bucks per year.
They're doing 50 grand a month right now in revenue, up from 20 grand a year, going up from 10 grand a month back in 2020 when they raised a 1.3 million seed round with a 7 million cap. They're building efficiently here. 80 customers paying call between 500 and a thousand bucks a month on average. Team of six. They outsource some of their engineering to simform.com.
As he looks, Matt looks to scale. Hey folks, my guest today is Matt Doyle. He's building enterprise forms and automation at buildarray.com. He's got a fascinating entrepreneurial career that includes opening the markets at the NASDAQ lunch with Richard Branson, a failed professional snowboarding career.
Chapter 2: How did BuildArray grow from $20k to $50k in MRR?
And he spent the last three years building rain in the platform. It is today. His hands-on visionary leadership drives the team forward to overcome obstacle by following the guiding principles. Listen hard, change fast, think big, start small. Matt, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, sounds great. Good introduction. Thanks very much.
I appreciate that. Okay, so enterprise forms and automation. I mean, I think forms and I think like SurveyMonkey type form. You're like an enterprise version of those guys?
Yeah, that on steroids. So we tend to sort of like work with big enterprises like Walmart, things like that. People who need to sort of take those types of paperwork up to the next level.
Chapter 3: What distinguishes BuildArray from traditional form tools?
So operations type paperwork. We tend to sort of displace legacy systems in organizations.
Okay.
I mean, my audience, when they think about type form and they think about what Walmart might need on top of their type form, give me an example. What is something Walmart needs that only you can deliver?
Not all forms are created equal. Some forms are used for surveys. Type form is a fantastic tool for surveys, question by question. That's not what we try and be. That's not what we are. We're operational paperwork. We're things where Excel is used for data collection, fillable PDFs, paper and pen, clipboards. So our applications work offline.
You can do things like signatures, repeatable fields, conditional logic, mathematical equations. We're used for doing food safety checks, audits, compliance.
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Chapter 4: How does BuildArray cater to enterprise-level clients?
So that's the type of stuff we're doing. It's just not where Typeform would want to operate in. So that's the areas we're working.
This is super interesting. I mean, just looking at how you just said on your website, I think it's cool. Turn paperwork into a mobile app, right? So let's dive more into the story here, right? So I want to get more of your background. Before we do that, though, obviously, Walmart is a big enterprise customer. But what does the average customer pay you per month or per year to use the technology?
we we have that saying you know you know think big but start small because we want you know people as they're approaching new technology they want to be able to try out they want to do a free version so in array you can go there today you can sign up for a free account it has like a limitation on submissions it's designed for trying to start doing offline data collection so we have mobile applications for ios and android so if you're doing some kind of field-based work it's gonna be fantastic for that it's free uh but then we have like the top pack is like 40 per user per
month. But we range from people who have just one or two users up to the bigger people who have thousands of users.
So don't name the logo, obviously, but your biggest customer is paying what per year or range?
The biggest is $20,000 plus a month.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do they face in pricing their services?
So what would they be getting? I mean, how many seats are they paying for? If I'm paying you a quarter million bucks a year,
Yeah. When it goes up to that area, sometimes these industries, per seat license, it doesn't always make sense. And that's the thing for any founder is probably going to find is software as a service makes sense to a point. But then as soon as you get up to the higher volumes, it doesn't make sense for different reasons.
So it could be that they have thousands of users, but they only fill in something once or twice a week. And can you really warrant spending that? Can you warrant charging them that amount of money? Or maybe the value proposition is in a different place. So we work with insurance companies and insurance adjusters.
So they might have sporadic people that come in and do the work, but every time they do do the work, it's worth quite a lot because it's per claim. So we tend to sort of work on billing in a different way. One thing we always try and do about pricing is remove complexities that we never stop them using the product to its full degree.
Chapter 6: How does BuildArray ensure customer satisfaction and retention?
So we never want to set pricing that they're trying to gain the amount of users they have. So we'll start to give people up to a certain amount of users for a price. So knowing that they're going to fluctuate up and down a bit. But so we know where we are as a company in MRR and ARR, and we know that they're using the product properly. Because I'm a product founder, really.
And I want to make sure people are actually like getting the most value for the product and they're using it correctly. And so sometimes a typical per seat license at that higher volume doesn't make a ton of sense.
Fair, fair, fair. I'm going to push you into average here just because it's so wide. It's hard for me to focus my questions when it's so wide. Would you say sort of the average team signing up for you is paying for like 10 seats or a hundred seats?
A thousand bucks a month.
Okay. Which is what about 15, 20 seats? Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of their pre-seed funding round?
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Put this on a timeline for me here. When did you launch the business? What year?
So we launched quite a while ago as an MVP. I'm a product founder, so it's quite a few years back. We launched a little product that was called LaunchCloud. When was that, though? It was about seven years. Seven years. We had a little MVP. Yeah. Thanks for doing the math for me on that one.
Chapter 8: What advice does the guest offer to aspiring founders?
And we were working with field marketing companies. We worked with brands directly. So we worked with people at Nintendo, Bosch, Coca-Cola. And we found the problem with that market is it's very kind of fickle. You know, they've got a campaign going on. You're the biggest thing. But then the campaign comes to an end. So then three and a half years ago, I moved to America.
We had this base product with a little bit of revenue. We rebranded and became Array, buildarray.com. and focus more on operation and risk. So we started working on new functionality within the product that lended itself to that industry. And that was the first time we raised money. So about two years ago, we raised our first pre-seed round.
Before that, it was bootstrapped, just this little app that was for some marketing agencies. And that's where the big pivot happened for us.
And how much did you raise in 2020?
$1.3 million.
And why did you need that money? I mean, obviously, bootstrapping is a beautiful thing. You have 100% control, no board. It's great. Why give up that freedom?
Well, it's a blessing and a curse. Like, you know, you're able to make a lot of mistakes behind, you know, without too many people seeing when you're bootstrapping. Um, but it's just, you know, with software as a service, you know, if you can't kind of figure out how to get lots of customers really quick, and that can be hard for B2B companies like us, right?
If it's someone like Typeform, you might be able to, although they did raise a ton of money, um, there's lots of viral ways that you could be, you know, acquire customers. Um, But we weren't able to do stuff like that. So we needed to raise capital and go after some of these more enterprise level customers. So we wanted to, and also we want to pay our staff better. We wanted to retain people.
We want to hire people.
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