The Exchanges

Q How did you find those outsource developers? Did you work with a firm? And if so, what was the URL?

A I've worked for a lot of, I've worked with lots of external developers with mixed success over time, and often, like, external people, they kind of go through seasons. Like, they'll be amazing, and if something happens in their life or whatever, and things go, not so good. But this company, I'm happy to recommend them. I'm on their website as a testimony. So they're called SimForm. Nothing to do with forms. Not sure why they have that name, but it's SimForm, and it was a fellow founder from one of our venture capital partners who Recommended we should try them out, and we do. We use them for QA, and we use them for iOS and Android. And I've used them for some React native development as well.

AI assessment note: “it was a fellow founder from one of our venture capital partners who Recommended”

Q Okay. Fair enough. Put this on a, on a timeline for me here. When did you launch the business? What year?

A So we, we launched quite a while ago as an MVP. I'm a, I'm a product founder. So it's quite a few years back. We launched a little product that was called launch cloud. It was about seven years, seven years. We had MVP. Yeah. Uh, thanks for doing the math on me, for me on that one. And, um, we were working with field marketing companies and we worked with brands directly. So we, we worked with people at Nintendo, uh, Bosch, Coca-Cola, And we found the problem with that market is it's very kind of fickle. You know, 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, um, I moved to America. Uh, we had this base product with a little bit of revenue. We rebranded and became Array, buildarray.com, and focused 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 to us.

AI assessment note: “We launched a little product that was called launch cloud. It was about seven years”

Q And why did you need that money? And obviously bootstrapping is a beautiful thing. You have a hundred percent control, no board. It's great. Why give up that freedom?

A 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 B to B companies like us, right? If you're 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. Um, so we wanted to, uh, and also we want to pay our staff better. We wanted to retain people. We want to hire more people.

AI assessment note: “we needed to raise capital and go after some of these more enterprise level customers”

Q for SimForm. All right. Very cool. Um, and then what, you know, I think a lot of founders when they work with an outsourced dev firm, they just, they expect that that firm is just going to do everything for them. You have to really give a strong spec to get success with an outsourced firm. Like how do you make sure and you set Simform out up for success?

A Well, we luckily got a great CTO, Michael Hudson, who's based in the UK. Um, but I, I'm a designer, so I give them all the designs. They have the full Full designs they have there. And so normally, like I said, the apps may be maintained at this point. So we were moving from one company to another. So they were taking over. That's a good thing about simple. Most agencies don't really want to take on someone else's code. And I understand why that makes a lot of sense, but they were good and they, they helped us take on that legacy code and helps improve it and squash any bugs that we had. But nowadays they're kind of working on things that kind of already exist and they're just enhancing them or improving them. So the scopes don't have to be super complex, but you're right. Good designs, well thought through designs and good scope, uh, of like each project and breaking those down into small sprints. If you're building from scratch and again, our CTO, you know, is very senior. So he's there to help their team because they have project managers. They do have senior people, but sometimes you've got people who just need a bit more handholding and having a CTO that understands who could maybe coach them a little bit has been helpful too.

AI assessment note: “Good designs, well thought through designs and good scope, uh, of like each project”

Q at how you just said on your website, I think it's cool. Turn paperwork into a mobile app, right? Um, so, so let's, let's dive more into the story here, right? So, um, I want to get more of your background before we do that though. Obviously Walmart is a big enterprise customer, but what is the average customer pay you per month or per year to use the technology?

A Well, 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 it 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 going to be fantastic for that. It's free. Uh, but then we have like, The top pack is like 40 dollars per user per month. Uh, but we, we range for people who have just one or two users, uh, up to the bigger people who have thousands of users.

AI assessment note: “The top pack is like 40 dollars per user per month.”

Q So what, what would they be getting? I mean, how many seats are they paying for, for if I'm paying you a quarter million bucks a year?

A Yeah. When it goes up to that area, like sometimes these industries, it doesn't, per seat licensing doesn't always make sense. And that's the thing for any, 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 like they only fill in something once or twice a week, right? And can you really warrant spending that kind of, 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 like 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 with our pricing is remove complexities that we never stop them using the product to its full degree. 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. Uh, but so we know where we are as a company in MRR and ARR, and they know that we know that they're using the product properly because, uh, you know…

AI assessment note: “per seat licensing doesn't always make sense... work on billing in a different way”