Sponsor

2024/05/03

Typeform grew to $80m+ with these 3 growth levers


From product-led growth, to a paid strategy, to upmarket
 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

View in browser

Discover the insights and tactics that took top SaaS companies from $0-1m, to $1-10m, to $10-25m, and beyond, the first Friday of each month

ActiveCampaign's Monthly Spotlight Email

We've built SaaS Steps newsletter because the tactics that take SaaS businesses from zero to $1m ARR are completely different from the tactics that get us from $10 to $100m. We're breaking things down step-by-step, so brands at different stages of their journey can learn from fast-growth SaaS success stories and reach the next stage in their journey.

Today, we're giving you the inside scoop on how Typeform grew through product-led growth (PLG) to a paid strategy, to upmarket. Let's dive into Typeform's journey to $80m+ ARR and analyze each stage.

$0-1m: Disruption, design, and horizontality 

In 2012, Typeform founders Robert Muñoz and David Okuniev were operating a digital marketing agency in Barcelona. A client asked them to create a form that could be used to collect information about people attending an exhibition. 

All the existing options felt stale – the industry was ripe for disruption. So they took the plunge and decided to do something different, creating a form that was conversational and powerful. After their project wrapped, they committed to turning the idea into a product. 

Design focus

Typeform was strategically designed to provide a great experience for both the creator and the respondent. One of the main differentiators in the early days was that Typeform had multi-step forms, breaking up the flow for respondents and creating an intuitive experience that drove higher completion rates. And they sweated the small stuff, from the typography to the colors. It was all part of Typeform's brand differentiation.

Ease of use

Typeform wanted to give creators the superpowers of a designer and a developer. As a low-code / no-code tool, companies could easily and efficiently create engaging experiences. Instead of requiring IT or design team support, Typeform customers could easily create, embed, and integrate their forms. 

Horizontal market

The founders didn't start with a niche market. Instead, they built a product for everyone, knowing that every business in the world needs to use forms, surveys, or quizzes to gather data. The problem they were solving for with a differentiated solution spanned many use cases and buyer personas, and with a naturally high demand for form builders, Typeform's horizontal nature helped it get initial traction.

$1-20m: PLG and brand

As Typeform began to mature, they leaned heavily into the natural virality and product-led growth.

Freemium model

Typeform prioritized accessibility with a generous freemium model and a paywall much deeper in the product. Similar to the playbook of iconic brands like Slack, Zoom, Loom, and Dropbox, they wanted to get customers through the door and using the product.

Viral loop

The more customers who created and shared forms, the more people who discovered the product and created their own forms. Typeform benefitted from a built-in PLG motion and with things like "Powered by Typeform'' on every form, with tens of thousands of customers producing forms, the product became viral. Later on, Typeform tested serving ads post-submit. 

Integrations

Typeform needed to work seamlessly with the tech stack so that the data collected through forms could be pushed through to other tools and actioned on. Many users leveraged third-party tools like Zapier, but they also had options to use webhooks. Typeform built an open API in 2017 and also began building native integrations in their partner platforms.

Brand

During this phase, Typeform began to grow its marketing team and invest in the brand.  The focus was on capturing existing demand and guiding potential customers to Typeform as a better alternative. Most of the content plays were bottom-of-the-funnel, intended to show interested prospects that there is a better way to do data collection.

Advocates

At this point, Typeform's brand was garnering buzz from thought leaders, like John Maeda, a design-eyed VC who noted that Typeform set the standard for product experience. 

$20-80m: Google Ads, product, and pricing evolution

During this next phase of growth, Typeform shifted from its founder-led growth days to the stewardship of a new CEO, Kim Lecha. Having held COO and CFO roles, Kim came to Typeform with 20 years of experience scaling high-growth companies.

The first chapter of Typeform's journey was largely driven by PLG. To continue to accelerate growth, Typeform needed to add a second engine designed to attract customers.

The team focused on building go-to-market (GTM) motions that satisfied three criteria:

  1. Must be scalable

  2. Fast feedback loops (no waiting months to see if things work)

  3. Under 12 month payback period 

With this model in mind, they doubled down on: 

Google Search Ads

Because there was so much demand for words like "forms", "surveys", and "lead generation", Typeform began bidding for these words to capture the demand. They used a blend of branded and non-branded keyword tactics but focused on capturing demand via non-branded keywords. Using machine learning, they optimized the bidding process.

Pricing adjustments

With the space becoming increasingly competitive, Typeform continued to evolve with differentiating capabilities and began to adapt its pricing strategy to better represent the value they were delivering for different customer types. 

Upmarket infrastructure

To service more mid-market or enterprise customers, Typeform invested in the compliance and infrastructure changes needed to facilitate this (HIPAA, ISO 2700, SSO, etc).

During this stage, Typeform grew rapidly from 45,000 customers to more than 125,000 customers, and from 200 million submissions to more than 500 million submissions annually.

$80m+: Unified systems, sales, and upmarket

Off the back of raising $135m in a Series C, Typeform was well capitalized to drive the next phase of growth.

Customer-first

They shifted their North Star metric from number of customers to number of submissions, really drilling down on their ideal customer profile and leaning into the natural PLG roots that drove Typeform's early success. By bringing in high-value customers who would use and love the product, every customer would generate more forms and more revenue on average.

GTM shift

While marketing remained focused on SMBs, sales began to target enterprise customers (15,000+ submissions per month) as part of their refined North Star metrics of submissions. In addition, Typeform began investing in other GTM motions, including partnerships and marketing demand-creation activities. 

Unified team, tech stack, and data

Typeform broke down silos, unifying its GTM teams, tools, and processes to unlock siloed data and create a comprehensive, end-to-end customer understanding. They brought together marketing, sales, and customer success under one revenue roof to become a united front with shared goals. Additionally, they built out a RevOps function responsible for creating world-class tooling infrastructure that allowed for seamless data sharing across teams and systems. This unified approach solved not only for revenue leakage that comes from conflicting priorities and resources but also enabled every lead to be routed to a personalized journey, ultimately resulting in a better customer experience.

As Typeform looks to its next chapter, it seeks to continue to be a leader in design and customer experience, continuing to dominate the category they have pioneered for nearly a decade.

Do you have any questions about the stages of growth mentioned above? Reply and let me know.

Casey Hill, Sr. Growth Manager @ ActiveCampaign

Love this newsletter? Subscribe for future breakdowns of top SaaS companies growth by stage.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Keep a civil tongue.

Label Cloud

Technology (1464) News (793) Military (646) Microsoft (542) Business (487) Software (394) Developer (382) Music (360) Books (357) Audio (316) Government (308) Security (300) Love (262) Apple (242) Storage (236) Dungeons and Dragons (228) Funny (209) Google (194) Cooking (187) Yahoo (186) Mobile (179) Adobe (177) Wishlist (159) AMD (155) Education (151) Drugs (145) Astrology (139) Local (137) Art (134) Investing (127) Shopping (124) Hardware (120) Movies (119) Sports (109) Neatorama (94) Blogger (93) Christian (67) Mozilla (61) Dictionary (59) Science (59) Entertainment (50) Jewelry (50) Pharmacy (50) Weather (48) Video Games (44) Television (36) VoIP (25) meta (23) Holidays (14)

Popular Posts