Serves 125,000+ paying customers and more than 500 million digital interactions

Reportedly reached $70 million ARR in 2021 as they announced a $135 million Series C

Grows organically with 80% of new customers signing up from word-of-mouth or product virality

the very idea for Typeform came out of his time running a design agency in Barcelona. While working on a project for a client that wanted a digital form in their stores, David and co-founder Robert Munoz got inspired by the 1983 film WarGames where Matthew Broderick hacks into a military central computer computer.

His stated goal was to “turn forms into a conversation.”

The company’s early growth model was pretty simple. Beta users created Typeforms and then shared those Typeforms with their communities. Each form had a “Powered by Typeform” button and the viral loop scaled from there.

“I don’t think there was any science to it, I just think it was the right time. We’ve tested this, and people are liking it. And so we put in the PRO plan where we had some really essential features.”

David recalls that pricing was only $25 per month at the time. To sweeten the deal, Typeform offered a 50% discount for anyone upgrading to a yearly plan (it only cost $120 for the first year!).

In the first month, Typeform had 1,000 paying customers. They were off to the races.

The company began investing heavily in content marketing, specifically thought pieces and writing on the Typeform blog.

Since the product had such low barriers to entry, Typeform attracted a wide number of use cases. Some of those use cases were “quite leaky” - low-value or campaign-based. Typeform started focusing on customers that wanted to put Typeform in their process or their workflow, which is where Typeform would work best.

One learning: a lot of the viral loop wasn’t immediately trackable and instead showed up as direct traffic or traffic from organic search. Many people would do keyword searches for Typeform because they had either seen Typeform in the wild or heard about it, then went to search for it.

“Like any company, we can grow so much organically and with our viral loop. But we need to grow with bigger customers to have a better retention curve. We are definitely looking at moving upmarket.”

“We only have two to three weeks of visibility into what we do, and we just work through it. We don’t have meetings. We just have a continuous loop of creation, creation, creation. We work really fast and make decisions in a second. User testing happens once we put stuff out. It doesn’t happen before because we’re busy building. And we just iterate, iterate, iterate.”

“There’s obviously validation in terms of revenue,” David told me. “When we were at $1 million in revenue with VideoAsk, we knew we had something that really fits and people are willing to pay for it. But you can also get strong intuitions from the beginning.”

While it’s anecdotal, intuition has an important role to play to measuring product-market fit.

David had clear advice for aspiring PLG founders: user experience is everything now.

Invest in making sure you’re not just leveraging AI, but you’re using really good user experience to get the best out of it.

Sweat the details. A well-polished product will help you stand above your competition. If you don’t, it’ll be hard to break through.