I reverse engineered how Typeform grew to $90 million in ARR.

Typeform has quietly become a $935 million company. While competing with the likes of Google and Mailchimp. This year, it will join the unicorn club.

But how did they grow so fast? I wanted to discover their secret.

Here's what I found:

The beginning

Typeform embodies the spirit of building to scratch your own itch. The founders David and Robert were running their own design agencies in Barcelona and partnered on a project together.

The deliverable? Building a sleek contact form to collect leads. Just like that, Typeform was born.

David and Robert shopped around for solutions but they didn't like what they found. So they decided to completely redesign the experience of collecting info.

They followed one simple mantra: Make form-filling an enjoyable experience that emulates a real conversation.

Growth

Positioning and design

Typeform stood out via its positioning and user-focused design.

Typeform was positioned to enable any person to create a form their audience would love to fill out. With this and user-focused design, Typeform took off.

Growth loops

In October 2012, Typeform released a teaser video on Betalist. This went absolutely viral and got Typeform its first 1,000 users.

Typeform leveraged growth loops very early on. Users created Typeforms and then shared those with their communities. Each form had a “Powered by” button and was hosted on the Typeform subdomain.

The growth flywheel kicked in, and by February 2014, Typeform had reached 50k users.

Fundraising and revenue

In 2013, Typeform raised a seed round and set up a paid tier.

It was set at $120/yr and $25/mo. They offered a 50% discount for anyone upgrading to a yearly plan.

On month one, Typeform had 1,000 paying users, and it was time to put on the foot on the gas. Typeform expanded its team with the goal to make their growth loops 10x more impactful.

Conversions

Their virality coefficient was impressive.

Every two new sign-ups generated an additional sign-up. So the next step was to optimize the onboarding funnel for their new signups.

After A/B testing with the "powered by" CTA, Typeform finalised the copy as "Create your own Typeform". They got 200% more users just from this one small CTA change.

Typeform optimized their "thank you" page with the new CTA "create your typeform". Users could now create a Typeform without even signing up, reducing friction in the user journey.

They started creating Typeform templates which brought them significant long-tail SEO juice.

Brand awareness

By this time, Typeform had a lot more new users, but no increase in active users.

So David and his team went all in to build the Typeform brand.

They quantified their marketing efforts and operated by a simple mantra: Generate brand awareness and increase sign ups.

Typeform built brand awareness by doing 4 things:

1. Invested heavily into organic and paid search
2. Created editorial content and social media.
3. Doubled down on their template library, which became the focal point for their PLG efforts.
4. Created tutorials, guides and resources.

Sales and partnerships

Partnerships with agencies and tech stakeholders was an integral part of Typeform's growth efforts.

In 2019, Typeform hired a new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to lead their sales efforts.

They moved upmarket to grow with bigger customers like Hubspot and have a better retention curve.

Skunkworks

Typeform launched an in-house product design and development studio called Typeform Labs. This is where they experiment with new products under the Typeform brand.

They already have two products — VideoAsk and Formless — bringing in millions each year.

VideoAsk by Typeform is a video-driven data collection product and reached $1m in revenue in the first year itself.

Formless is an AI powered form builder and is gaining momentum too.

Takeaways

Here are 5 lessons to learn from Typeform:

1. Growth loopS + low sign-up friction + social sharing = virality
2. Build something to scratch your own itch.
3. Build a functional and aesthetic product/brand.
4. CRO is your 80-20.
5. Think about your customers and their users when building.

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