The Exchanges

Q Sorry, sorry. I'm not asking about revenue. I'm talking about if someone listening right now, I'm trying to help him market here. If someone listening right now wants to use JotForm, what are they going to probably pay on average per month?

A Well, I mean, again, they can use our single plans or what we call our bronze, our bronze, silver gold plans, which are our single user plans. And those are listed on the website. They go anywhere high as 99 dollars a month, the 39 dollars 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. And that starts, uh, it's about 70 to 7200 dollars a year for that without compliance and things like that. So, you know, it depends on what your needs are as part of what part as part as what somebody is actually going to be investing in the product.

AI assessment note: “They go anywhere high as 99 dollars a month, the 39 dollars a month”

Q 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 at the hundred mark and then they convert no touch?

A Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because once they hit that, they get, you know, they'll, they'll log in and they'll get just a display pops up. Uh, they're logged into our system and then they'll get a display that says, Hey, you've reached your maximum number of submissions for the month. Um, to continue, you need to upgrade to our, that would be our bronze plan. And then at that point, then if they say, yes, I 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 in 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, you know, 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 point.

AI assessment note: “Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because once they hit that, they get”

Q It's totally free. You can go to nathanlatka.com forward slash hotjar. No credit card required. Again, use it as much as As you want, nathanlaka.com forward slash hot jar. I'll see you there. If you kind of back into today, what you're paying to acquire a customer, or maybe not what you're actually paying, but a different question is, what are you willing to pay to acquire a customer currently?

A I mean, really what we're willing to pay is, you know, I think we would go as high as maybe 20 to 30 dollars per acquisition for a paid customer. Um, but we're not paying anything near that, to be honest with you. Um, because again, because the way our, the model works for us when they come in and they will, and they will generally come in as, as a free user to start with. We do get a certain percentage that come paid right off the gate, but we get a certain percentage that will come in as a free user. And then when they, they will stick around as a free user, probably for say, Six to eight weeks, maybe nine months, maybe not 90 days. And then they start to see the value and their needs grow. And then at that point it's like, well, I need the, I need to purchase the product cause I need additional forms or I need more form submissions or I need additional features. Maybe they want to take more online payments, something along those lines. And then from that point, then they come on and then the longterm, the longterm of a customer for us is, and we measure that in years.

AI assessment note: “we would go as high as maybe 20 to 30 dollars per acquisition”

Q So let's go, let's go and talk about that. Right? So, um, you're obviously competing in a space. There's a lot of venture backed companies, right? In your same space. There's some also that are bootstrapped, very capital efficient. What's been your go to market? How have you grown the user base?

A Um, you know, we're bootstrapped. We're, we've never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere. So all of our, you know, all of our growth has been purely organic. And what, you know, what we focused on really is, is delivering a good, solid, high quality product. Right. And making the user experience good. But our marketing has really been revolving around SEO. Um, we have really kind of planted our flag on the SEO side. And, uh, and I've used that and leveraged that tremendously across all different types of platforms. I mean, not only just in, you know, like say traditional text types of content, but also in video content has been very big for us also.

AI assessment note: “our marketing has really been revolving around SEO”

Q I'm on the YouTube page, your guys' YouTube page today. Uh, it looks like, you know, you guys post things like how to create a property listing online, how to start an online clothing business from home, three widgets that will help you increase form completion rate. How do you guys come up with what things to put in the title? Obviously there's, there's search traffic research going into that.

A A lot of it is, yeah, a lot of it's brainstorming internally, but we also look at what our, what our customers are asking for through our support channel, right? So if they're asking just to support, I want to do this, how do I do that? And so we'll come back and we'll just start looking at that and go, well, how can we build some video around that? Or how can we build some kind of content around that? And as a result, and it helps drive all the, all of our other materials that come with it. And the benefit of things like the video is that 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 can be posted. The shelf life might be just a couple of months and then that gets kind of archived, but video lives forever, basically.

AI assessment note: “brainstorming internally, but we also look at what our, what our customers are asking”

Q How do you know whether to focus your energy on, like, them just getting the form, like, them just logging on, them, them just getting their first form created, them actually launching and embedding their first form, them actually getting 20 new opt-ins to the form, like, how do you know which of these points you should put most of your resources to?

A Yeah. We've, I mean, our, our metrics team is incredible and they do fantastic work and we've actually been able to look at so many of our new users to see what that usage pattern is when they come on board. And so we identified if somebody came in and just created a simple form, kind of like create it and then walked away. We found that the engagement fell off immediately, but we found that by going in there and continually to educate those users in that first 10 days of them as a new user to, to, Basically, did you know you could do this? Did you know you could do that with a jot form? Here's how you do it. We found that by showing them a path of how to do it, Significantly improve the engagement, and those customers then create more forms, and then we start to become a much bigger piece of their daily workflow as a company.

AI assessment note: “our metrics team is incredible... look at so many of our new users to see”

Q Come on, Steve, you're teasing me. What's the plan?

A The plan really is to, is where is the head off the problems before they pop up? Um, we have found what's really probably the biggest driver for us is when people have, uh, their, their credit cards expire. Right. When people just forget to do payment and we've identified that and went, wait a second, these people are just forgetting to update their payment. And so that's causing them to fall out. And by identifying that group earlier on, we're able to sit there. We did a test on that and we found, yes, when we alert them and say, did you know your payment's going to expire? Now we're finding that those people go, oh, I wasn't aware of that, and then they go ahead, and then they update their payments, and they stay on as a paying customer, so that that churn element does not happen.

AI assessment note: “The plan really is to, is where is the head off the problems”

Q barometer? Maybe this isn't specific to type to, to, to jot form specifically, but when you look at like type form, others in the space and other, just frankly, PLG tools that have a big premium 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 one percent, five percent, 10%?

A Well, I think everybody wants to get it higher than they can. I mean, a good five, a good five percent is about the industry average. It seems like for, for, and I'm talking about all SAS products, not just in the farm world. Um, but a five percent conversion rate seems to be pretty solid for people. And it varies. Some people can be even smaller because, you know, they could be down to one quarter, but they're, you know, they're, 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 five percent conversion rate. Uh, you know, is about, I think is about the industry average. We, you know, we look at that to see how do, how do we stack up against that industry? And, and again, it varies. Some months are better than others in some months, you know, but everybody seems to kind of bubble along that, that certain, that certain five percent threshold.

AI assessment note: “a good five percent is about the industry average”

Q And Steve was your, in terms of price point of your cheapest plan today, 39 dollars a month, was it always 39 or what did you test? Five dollars a month early on or 20 bucks a month. What does that look like?

A Uh, we started it off at around, uh, I think it was, uh, 19 dollars a month at one point. I mean, we have sales during the course of the year too. We'll have like a big end of year sale where we discounted. We also have a discount for nonprofits and, uh, education users, those types of things. But it's really come down to, as we look at what the competition's doing, we look at, you know, what our costs are, right? Cause I mean, obviously you can't, you can't have a price from five years ago and have it be consistent today just because That, you know, our cost of business goes up as well as everybody else's goes up. So, but there's a lot of things that we do to, we don't want to be the cheapest on the block, but we also know we don't need to be the most expensive. We try to look at what we can offer a fair value to our customers and what we think is fair. And we have not had really, you know, complaints from customers if a price goes up, because what we do also is when people are on a previous plan, they grandfather rent a debt plan. So Or a pretty grandfather in at that price. So they don't, they don't, our existing customer base does not really get impacted by price increases. It's only going to be incoming, new incoming types of customers.

AI assessment note: “we started it off at around, uh, I think it was, uh, 19 dollars”

Q do you look at this data coming in every month, every year, every week, you know, and basically go, okay, is a hundred the right number or should it be a thousand or should it be 10? Like, do you reverse engineer and say, we want five percent of free users to convert? And then you just, you know, toggle by based off that, or how do you do that?

A Uh, we really just, we, I mean, what we do is we look at where that number is. We look at our numbers on a daily basis, sometimes, you know, several times a day, but we look at them on a daily basis and then we aggregate them across different, you know, the geographies versus the timeframe. So we might look at, you know, again, what's up, what's going on in Australia on a monthly basis versus what's going on in Canada on a monthly basis, those kinds of things. But we find it's fairly, it's fairly consistent for us. Um, you know, sometimes it depends on whether, what the industry is somebody who's using. So For example, during, you know, the last couple of years with COVID, uh, healthcare use exploded, right? I mean, they, they needed it and, you know, desperately needed it because they suddenly had to go to, you know, no contact types of environments and things like that. But what we did for them is we said, okay, look, if you're a verified healthcare provider, whether you're a doctor or a health clinic or a hospital, whatever, we gave it to you for free. We gave you one of our silver plans for free for, You know, for a year. So you could just get in there and do what you had to do, um, you know, to help people. So those kinds of things we look at, but then we also look at that and go, well, how are people consuming the product? And that's really what it comes back down to. And…

AI assessment note: “We look at our numbers on a daily basis, sometimes, you know, several times”

Q So how many folks did you say are on that team and what are sort of the roles look like?

A Well, I mean, we've got, we've, 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 those, the keywords that people are looking at, how they're finding us, what types of phrases they're looking for, uh, you know, not only just in a general sense, but also based on a region, you know, regional type of situation. So from different geographies, if 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 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 forums. And then around that, then we can wrap content around that that helps address those SEO components.

AI assessment note: “we've got a couple of dozen people that are doing on the SEO site”

Q Billboards. Really? How do you even track a billboard conversion?

A Oh, you can do it. You just gotta be really, you gotta, you gotta be good at it. I mean, cause you can put them in certain regions and, um, you know, you don't just blast like the, like here in San Francisco where we're located, you know, hit the entire barrier. You might just focus on a real specific neighborhood, say down, you know, further South down towards Silicon Valley or a very specific neighborhood here in San Francisco itself. And you see what kind of response you get out of that. And, uh, so you can, If you want to look at an individual billboard, unless you've got one, no, but if you can look at other billboards, you can look at a group of billboards and you can say, Hey, look, this generated X amount of business for us. So there's potential in here.

AI assessment note: “you can put them in certain regions... And you see what kind of response you get”

Q any product coming down the pipeline, you know, if you guys have ten million users and you converted five percent, now this is probably high, but let's say you have 500,000 paid customers. If you sell them a 20 dollar, you know, a month new product, it was nicely with their forms. That's a lot of revenue expansion. Do you have a second or third product coming down the pipeline?

A Um, we're also looking at adding new features. Um, but as far as new products go, I can't comment on what we've got in the pipeline, but definitely both got new features coming up. So we're looking at different types of payment integrations. We're looking at making, you know, different types of, uh, backend, uh, backend feature adjustments for people, like how to pull your data out, how to analyze your data better in the backend types of systems. So it's one thing to get all your data. We want to have better tools in place to help people kind of You know, analyze the data. So we, we've built our, rebuilt our interfaces. So it looks almost like a spreadsheet type of model. Um, so people can actually look at things easier. They can sort it out. They can, you know, whatever types of parameters I want to work with, and then also push that data into other types of products, you know, whether it's a CRM or, or something else that people want to work with. Um, but it's, you know, making very easy to use dashboards, making things very, very user-friendly, those types of things. So it's, you know, We're kind of taking the no code, um, environment to, to heart on this and making it really, really simple for people to kind of customize their experience, you know, not only in the front end where they're building forms, but also on the back end where they're trying to interpret all that dat…

AI assessment note: “as far as new products go, I can't comment on what we've got”