Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I took to Dean McPherson, the co founder of Paperform, a SaaS product that enables anyone to create beautiful online forms, payment or product pages quickly and intuitively without any technical knowledge.
It was 2016 and Dean was working as a developer in Sydney, Australia.
After doing some work building online forms, he believed there was a gap in the market for a different type of form building product.
As a developer, turning his idea into minimum viable product wasn't hard, but getting the word out about his product and finding customers was a whole different ball game.
He promoted his product on beta list without much success, but it did help to get his product on the AppSumo team's radar and he was invited to do a launch with them.
After scrambling to get his MVP ready for the launch, he managed to land 3,000 customers.
But every AppSumo customer paid a one time lifetime price, so he still had zero recurring revenue, but it did give him enough to quit his job and work on the product full time with his wife.
They basically operated as a lifestyle business for the next couple of years.
Eventually Dean realized that if he wanted the business to grow, he needed to think about it differently.
Start hiring a team and getting a lot more serious about marketing.
That was something neither he or his wife knew much about.
Today, his company does over $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue and is still bootstrapped.
In this interview we talk about how he's grown his idea into a seven figure business, how he figured out how to differentiate his product in a very crowded market, and how hiring his first employee was a scary decision but turned out to be one of the best things he's done for his business.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Dean, welcome to the show.
Dean McPherson (02:20.030)
Hey Omar, thanks for having me.
Omer (02:21.950)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Dean McPherson (02:25.950)
Yeah, it's a great question.
I'm not much of a quotes person.
I think for me one of the big values I try and live and work by is the importance of thinking things through for yourself.
Not accepting the way things are as the be all and end all or the way things have to be.
But yeah, always thinking first before taking on external influence.
Omer (02:49.360)
So tell us about Paperform.
What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Dean McPherson (02:56.400)
Sure.
So at its heart, Paper Form's online form builder.
It's the easiest way of explaining what we are.
Most people have had experience with some online form builder in the past, but Paper form is used by primarily small business owners to make forms for all kinds of purposes.
One of the interesting things about our space is that forms actually is this huge category of lots of different solutions to lots of different problems.
So you think about paper form as part of the no code movement to a degree.
So people can use paper form not only just to create forms, but all kinds of solutions to problems from online client onboarding, taking payments, online, ordering forms, along with your standard kind of traditional web form spaces like surveys, quizzes, contact forms.
You name it, somebody's trying to do it with paper form.
Omer (03:52.220)
So give us a sense of the size of the business.
Where are you in terms of revenue today, Number of customers?
Sure.
Dean McPherson (03:59.340)
So we're about 6,000 customers and our revenue is around 1.5 million.
ARR you USD.
Omer (04:06.550)
So you launched the business in 2016 and your background is you're a developer, basically.
So tell me a little bit about like how did you come up with the idea for this business?
Dean McPherson (04:20.710)
Sure, sure.
So yeah, as you said, I'm a developer by trade.
So one of my first jobs when I entered the workforce was actually making forms for enterprise.
So they'll actually, they'll mobile forms, namely for like local government and kind of larger businesses for capturing data kind of out in the work field, which is, it's a very different kind of form to what to what we do with do at Paper Form.
But that kind of got me aware of the form space in general and then outside of that because I had friends and family who knew that I was a web developer and knew that I knew how to make forms.
I had some friends approached me to make registration forms for their events.
It was a school holiday kids program that they were running and they were looking for a way of capturing all the information that they needed for the registration for these events, along with taking payment.
And they wanted it to kind of look like their camp's brand.
These are kind of the important criteria for them.
So when they originally asked me to do that back in would have been 2013 or so, I had to look around at what solutions were out there because although I'm a developer, I would far rather just give somebody a solution so that they can do it themselves as opposed to building it for them.
But I wasn't happy with anything that I Found I couldn't really recommend anything.
So I ended up building these bespoke forms for a couple of years for them, just so that they could send an email, take a payment and capture, you know, more than you would normally capture for just like a ticket for an event.
So they would have to capture, you know, children's details, parent care information, dietary requirements, asthma medication plans, that kind of stuff, you know, 30 questions or so.
So more advanced than ticketing, but also needs to look great, needs to represent their, their brand and be able to take payment.
So there seemed to be this gap in this, in the market which was sitting in the back of my mind.
Omer (06:16.090)
So describe that gap to me because there's no shortage of form builders out there today.
And even in 2016, there was, there was a bunch of them around.
So, you know, most people would look at that kind of market and say, there's already a number of players in there.
Maybe this isn't where I should be, you know, investing my time.
Maybe I should look at a different kind of market.
What was the gap that you saw there?
Dean McPherson (06:42.760)
Yeah, I think the gap, there's.
There's a couple of edges in this gap.
I think a lot of the really big players in the form space are really finely tuned to the kind of marketing surveys, quizzes, market.
So, like Typeform, huge player, but their product, it's one question at a time.
It's of a very certain style and it really lends itself to a certain style of form.
If you took something like a Typeform and said, I want to fill out a hundred questions and I want to set up logic for that and I want it to represent my brand and not Typeform's brand, you're going to really struggle because when you ask one question at a time, people get to question 10 and they go, oh, oh, how much longer is this?
So you have that kind of end of the space and then the other end, you have a lot of these kind of really big legacy form builder players.
You've got Wufu, Jotform, SurveyMonkey to a degree, and they make more traditional forms, but you're trading off that general aesthetic.
Their forms, especially at the time, were quite what you would imagine a form builder would look like in 2009.
That really seemed standard old web form experience.
And there was definitely a lot of limitation across the whole form builder market in terms of payments.
So you could generally take payments with most of those form builders in a simple, I just want to charge a single price.
But nothing was really optimized to function in kind of an E commerce capacity.
So we saw a space of we want a form builder, but we want it to be more than just a form builder and we want it to.
To be able to look like you, not like us and.
Yeah, and you to be able to actually meet all of the needs of your business requirements, not just one aspect.
Omer (08:29.550)
So when you say we, who is we?
Dean McPherson (08:32.190)
So we is my wife and I.
So my wife Dioni, who's also my co founder.
Omer (08:36.910)
And so you see this gap.
But you guys were both working full time jobs.
At what point did you decide that this was something you wanted to get serious about?
Dean McPherson (08:51.000)
Yeah, so I mean as a programmer I always liked to build things on the side.
You know, I'm obviously one of those kind of motivated people that, that likes to try and make things.
So we'd hit this stage in 2016.
We've been married a couple of years, we're living in Sydney and it's a quite an expensive place to live and we really liked our jobs but we were looking for an opportunity to really take control and ownership of something and we had this idea that we could make a product, put it online and hopefully get it to a stage where it would pay the bills.
And so our ambitions at the beginning were really quite small.
We just wanted something to kind of replace our jobs that we could control.
So yeah, we hit this stage in 2016 where I started working on this idea.
I didn't really know if it was going to be anything, so I don't think we actually really made the call that we were going to try and grow this into something even to replace our day jobs probably for another four or five months after we actually even started working on it.
Obviously in the early days I was the one primarily working on it because Dion is not a programmer.
So a lot of the work to be done was can we make a product.
But it wasn't really until we started putting that a beta out and getting engagement in the product that we're like, oh, maybe we've got something here and we can actually make something of this product.
Omer (10:10.180)
What was the tech stack that you used to build the product?
I keep getting emails from some listeners saying, talk more about this stuff.
This is for you guys.
Dean McPherson (10:20.100)
Tell me about the stack, just for you.
So our stack's pretty boring, pretty simple.
Our back end's primarily Laravel, which is big PHP framework, front end is very heavy in react, very kind of cut and dry.
We used a few other little things here and there on both the front end and the back end, but that's the core of it.
Omer (10:40.110)
And that's pretty much hasn't changed since you built the first version of the product.
Dean McPherson (10:45.470)
No, no.
We do a lot more these days around using serverless, so using Lambdas and that kind of thing.
For any services that we need to.
That need to kind of support a scaling workload, we try and use that, but our core stack hasn't changed since day one.
Omer (11:04.110)
Cool.
Okay, so you've kind of got this idea, you're sort of noodling around building this product.
Tell me about the first version of Paperform.
What did it actually do?
Dean McPherson (11:19.390)
So the very first version, when we put it up on Beta list, was very, very raw.
I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure you could add pictures, like add images to the, to the form, but you couldn't resize them.
You could put in rich text on the page, you could add questions, but we had a very limited subset of questions.
And maybe you may have been able to send yourself an email summary of the submission results.
And I think that was it.
I'm pretty sure you couldn't send emails to other people.
You couldn't integrate with anything.
It was very, very simple.
Omer (11:56.650)
And so you put it up on Beta list and what kind of reaction did you get?
Dean McPherson (12:01.210)
So we had about 300 people sign up through Beta List to try it out, and to be honest, we didn't get a whole lot of value out of those people in terms of actual valuable feedback into the product.
But what we did get was approached by AppSumo to run a deal to launch, pay, perform through a deal on AppSumo.
Omer (12:22.280)
Did they put any, like, did they look at the product and say, you need to do this or.
Dean McPherson (12:27.960)
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
So we were quite frank in our initial discussion with them that, you know, the product was in active development and was obviously missing quite a few things.
So I think the big ones were obviously, you need to be able to email other people and you need to be able to resize images and put in a bit more work in terms of the general theming of the form experience.
So we made sure we got that done before we launched.
Omer (12:53.890)
Okay, and so how long did that take before you were able to kind of do the launch on AppSumo?
Dean McPherson (12:59.890)
Yeah, I think AppSumo started talking to us about September 2016, and we launched December 6, 2016.
That was our official launch of V1, of paper form, where we started actually having people pay us for the product.
Got it.
Omer (13:17.440)
So, I mean, AppSumo can be a great platform.
For early stage products to generate buzz, find some early customers and so on.
But there are a couple of downsides that often come up.
Number one is nearly everything is a lifetime deal, so you're not generating any recurring revenue.
It's a one time thing.
And secondly, a lot of people tell me that, you know, what do they call them, Sumo links.
The people who use appsumo can be quite, quite brutal with kind of ratings and reviews of the products if it's not kind of, you know, nicely polished and stuff.
So how did that work out for you?
Dean McPherson (14:00.620)
Look?
So our overall launch experience was actually really positive.
There's definitely truth in both, in both of those, in both of those criticisms.
Obviously, knowing that you're going to get a single lump sum payment and have to support lifetime customers is something you really need to think through before deciding to run a lifetime deal.
For us, it was a worthwhile trade off.
And in terms of sumo lings, I think there was definitely aspects of that in the community when we ran our deal.
And I think it's gotten a lot worse over the last few years as the popularity of appsumo as a way of launching software has really grown.
I think we might have got in when things were a little bit kinder.
There's definitely a certain Persona type which falls under an appsumo customer.
In general.
They're very deal oriented, very value oriented and they're all about trying to get as much value out of their dollar as they can.
So that was part of our learnings over the next few years that we had quite an active appsumo user base, but actually reconciling that they're not our target customer all the time.
So taking their feedback, always with a grain of salt, that they're going to be reflecting their needs, maybe not the needs of who Paperform's true target customer will have, if that makes sense.
Omer (15:22.300)
Did you know who your target customer was at that point?
Your ideal customer?
Dean McPherson (15:26.300)
No, absolutely not.
Omer (15:27.980)
So you were just like, anybody who'll pay is the customer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.
And then.
So how many sales did you make on the appsumo launch?
Dean McPherson (15:35.740)
So we sold about 3,000 lifetime deals.
Omer (15:38.220)
Yeah.
And so just looking back at that, is that something that you, if somebody's in a situation where they're thinking, I'd like to give it a go, I'd like to try and do an appsumo launch and I'm okay with some of the, you know, some of the kind of the potential downsides that we just talked about.
Is that something you do again, if you, if you were in that situation,
Dean McPherson (15:59.270)
I think the downsides, there's probably a few more in there which I would weigh in now.
So as, as it's grown in popularity and it's become more of a done thing, there is certainly a growing perspective that, you know, software that runs through deal sites might be of lesser quality or I think there's been some negative experiences where people have run, I wouldn't say fraudulent programs, but they've run a software launch just to get that initial cash and then they'll ditch supporting the product or they'll renege on the deal terms and that kind of thing.
So there's a whole lot of, kind of associations which you would need to try and research and be aware of before I would go into it again and a lot of it would be around what kind of products I'm taking to market.
I think Appsumo works really well.
If you've got a general enough tool that most businesses would have the use case for it or think that they might one day have the use case for it.
If you're something that's, that's way more niche and focused, then you're probably not going to be as successful in terms of running the deal itself and it might not be worth all the other downsides.
Omer (17:11.230)
Okay, so you've got 3,000 customers from, from the Appsumo launch and now you've basically got several thousand customers that you have to keep supporting for life and they're not paying you anything else.
And where did you take the business from there?
Because I know, like, even at that point you told me earlier, it was still kind of like a lifestyle business.
Right.
And it stayed that way for the next, what, year or two?
Dean McPherson (17:41.520)
Yeah.
So our intention when we started Paper form was really we were just looking for something to pay the bills that we could work.
However we wanted to work whenever we wanted to work.
So it was actually just Diony and I running Paper form till it was actually the beginning of 2019 when we've made our first hire.
So just over two years between starting Paper form and actually hiring somebody to help us in the business.
So, you know, that mentality definitely shifted towards, towards the end of 2018.
We hit a stage where the business had grown really quite well and it was starting to be a lot more work than two people should probably be doing.
So we were kind of forced into this spot where we had to evaluate whether we put the foot on the brakes of growth a little bit to keep it at a size that we could maintain with just the two of us or we change our perspective a little bit and bring people in to help us and see how far we could grow the product.
And I mean, it wasn't really a hard decision when you frame it like that.
Omer (18:39.380)
Yeah, but it took a while, right, because between the time from that appsumo launch to when you made that first hire, I think it was about, about two years.
And.
And during that time you got to about 25k.
Mrr.
So what did the two of you do in that time to.
To grow that or actually grow any recurring revenue?
Dean McPherson (19:01.200)
Yeah, yeah.
So our focus early on, so we'd run this appsumo deal, we had 3,000 people who'd bought a lifetime pro license to Paper Form.
So our first, I suppose, experiment was to see if we could convert any of those into recurring revenue.
So the big call for us, we were still actually working full time after we'd launched Paper Form.
So we were looking to figure out whether anybody would actually pay us on a recurring basis because people would obviously pay us a one off fee to be able to use it forever.
But would they pay us 15 bucks a month or $39 a month or more?
So that was the big test.
So beginning of 2017, we tried to convert the appsumo deal buyers into recurring revenue.
So we brought in a plan that was above the plan that they had bought with more features and essentially tried to upsell them into that, which worked for a portion of that customer base.
Not a huge amount, but enough to validate that these people were willing to pay on a recurring basis.
And at the same stage, the word of mouth from having 3,000 people actively in your product was huge.
So we were getting people just coming to Paper form just from word of mouth referrals.
We were pretty new and word seemed to spread pretty quickly organically.
We didn't do a whole lot of active marketing in those two years, but we did do things like we integrated with Zepia, so we started doing some content partnerships there.
We integrated with a few other people as well.
And I suppose we were open to marketing opportunities as they came to us, but we weren't actively pursuing anything ourselves.
So we did lots of little odds and ends.
Omer (20:37.350)
So it sounds like the appsumo deal, even though it didn't generate any recurring revenue for you directly, it was, it was kind of like the catalyst.
It was like the fuel for the fire.
Dean McPherson (20:50.490)
Oh, absolutely.
Omer (20:51.770)
And then through word of mouth and that sort of thing you were able to grow.
Dean McPherson (20:55.770)
Yeah, I've never launched a product without that appsumo deal.
So it's hard for me to compare, but my suspicion is that that initial traction stage would be much, much harder without it.
Just in terms of, you know, like remove the money from the equation whatsoever.
If I went back in time and didn't know what I knew about the product now, it would still probably be worth running the appsumo deal in terms of actually having people in your product that are willing to tell you what they want and actually use your product.
That's really valuable in the early days, especially for something like paper form.
Like I mentioned the beta list beta that we ran, we had 300 people and the feedback we got from them was largely worthless because these weren't people that were actually trying to use the product in their businesses.
Whereas somebody's put down some money to use your product, they're in it, they want to use it, they want to get value out of it, and they're a particularly value oriented customer segment.
It translated to them building out a feature roadmap.
They really told us what we needed to build and it made it pretty obvious and clear for us in terms of what to build next.
Omer (22:04.420)
Yeah, I think that's a really good point that, you know, even though it might not be recurring revenue, when people have committed some money, they're more like, number one, you can take their feedback a little bit more seriously than someone who hasn't committed even a dollar.
And I think the other thing is that sometimes people are reluctant to use appsumo because, you know, I'm not going to get any recurring revenue from there.
But I guess the way to think about it is, well, the way you described it earlier, that's probably.
Those aren't probably your customers anyway.
Very few of those people are probably going to be paying a subscription or a recurring revenue plan.
So it's not like you're going to lose out something by doing this.
So I think it may not be the path for everyone, but I think it's certainly something worth considering.
Dean McPherson (22:57.020)
And also there is a segment of that user base which are just.
They're the early adopters, they're the people that are actually on appsumo because they want to be using and trying out the latest version of every possible software solution ever.
And as a segment, they're actually really valuable to be in contact with, A, because they've actually had a lot of experience with software before you and B, because they're the kind of people that go and tell everybody every new piece of software that ever comes out.
So getting on their Roadmap is actually of value as well.
Omer (23:27.280)
Yeah, pretty good point.
Okay, so by the end of 2018 you were earning around 25k MRR.
And you had.
We sort of looked at this and we said it's kind of like you said like a thousand ish customers around that time.
And then in the last two years, so all of 2019, 2020 and kind of where we are right now, it went from 1,000 something customers to over 6,000 customers.
So you added, you know, around 5,000 customers in the last two odd years.
And it just happens to be that that's also when you made your first hire.
Like are they connected?
Dean McPherson (24:14.990)
Yes, who'd have thought?
So yeah, our very first hires were.
So we brought in another developer to help me in the product who is technically our first hire, but at very much the same time we made our first growth hire.
So yeah, hiring growth has been one of the biggest things that's obviously moved the needle for our business.
Who'd have thought you hire somebody to grow your business and they grow your business.
It seems very obvious in hindsight and
Omer (24:43.280)
we should say like neither you or Diony were marketers, right?
Dean McPherson (24:46.440)
No.
So it was definitely the Dione comes from more of a project management background.
She's very great on the operational side of the business and especially on the customer support.
And she essentially runs the business of paper form.
And I'm very technical and product focused in my background.
I lean more towards the marketing side of the business a lot these days, but certainly by no means my background or my passion.
More of a founder's obligation that somebody needs to pay attention.
Omer (25:18.950)
Yeah, let's talk about that because I want to know what have you done in the last couple of years apart from hiring people?
What have you done to actually grow the business?
Dean McPherson (25:29.110)
Sure.
So in terms of growth strategies that we're using to grow from then till now, that kind of thing, right?
Omer (25:35.630)
Yeah, exactly.
Dean McPherson (25:36.790)
Sure.
So a lot of it was transitioning out of we'd gotten to kind of to that stage by 2018, kind of by word of mouth, a little bit of marketing here and there like, but nothing particularly intentional.
So the things that have really worked for us, we obviously.
So we ended up with two full time growth people by the end of 2019, by kind of the middle of 2019 actually.
And a lot of what we did in those early days was just experimentation.
So we were just trying to find what's actually going to move the needle for paper form.
And we found SEO to be kind of our number one priority and a Lot of that just makes sense for the form builder space.
It's quite an established market and generally I think this is probably true for most established SaaS markets that the primary way people discover any software is they're going to go to Google and they're going to type in Best Form Builder or best website creation tool or, and they're going to find a list and they're going to look through that list and then evaluate their options.
So, you know, things like making sure we're on every single one of those lists, reaching out to the authors and begging them to add us through to more intentional SEO plays as well.
That's been probably what's moved the needle the most for us over the past two years.
In the past year or so, we've reevaluated AdWords as well and we're starting to see some consistent traction there.
It's probably not as valuable as SEO to us and SEO is certainly obviously the golden goose.
If we can nail a CEO, then it's a much more cost efficient way of growing than obviously pouring more and more money into ads.
So we would love if SEO continues to drive the growth, but we're happy with ads as well.
Omer (27:22.440)
So I don't want to oversimplify things here, but it sort of sounds like a big part of the growth in the last couple of years in terms of adding on around 5,000 customers came from basically saying, let's hire a growth person, actually two, and get paper form showing up wherever people are looking for online form builders.
Dean McPherson (27:49.900)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's definitely a simplification and there's obviously playing more moving pieces, but it's true.
Omer (27:59.560)
So we started the conversation this way.
We said, you know, there's no shortage of form builders out there.
What, what have you done to, number one, figure out how to position paper form against your competitors and what kind of differentiation has worked and what hasn't?
What have you tried in the past that didn't work?
I'm just trying to figure out again, there's a lot of form builders out there.
How did you figure out why someone would choose paper form?
What was that kind of process like?
And what did you learn from that?
Dean McPherson (28:44.150)
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think one of the big differentiators for us early on was we really focused on the form creation experience itself.
We had felt that every time we tried to use one of our competitors form building products, that there was a clunkiness from a UX perspective in terms of actually creating a form.
And I think part of that was having created Forms kind of for a living before I knew what the ins and outs of actually making forms, like being an end user of a form creation tool, how bad that could be.
So, you know, creating forms on Paper form isn't, you know, a standard drag and drop experience where you've got your sidebar to the left with your different form types and you drag them over and you click into them one at a time and configure them on the right.
Our form creation is actually far more like using a document editor.
So it's far closer to say Google Docs or Word or it's actually functions quite similar to Notion, which is interesting because we, we kind of started around a similar time and now Notion's this huge thing and our editing experience is actually quite similar in a lot of ways in that it's quite block based so you can just click onto the page, start typing, off you go format that make it turn into rich content, insert images and video, and then insert questions along the way.
So a lot of our differentiation early on was around actually if you get in our product and you use it and you're a certain personality type, then it really resonates.
So Paper form, certainly we get people who come in and go, oh this is, I hate having this much control or why can't I just drag and drop the thing?
And they want to be more restricted.
But for real creators, I think that really resonates that they can do whatever they want.
So that gives a bit of free form creativity and additional power to the tool.
And then in terms of differentiation to the wider market in general, we actually really struggled to call Paper Form a form builder when we first launched it because obviously the end game is that most people will use it to make forms.
And the way the market thinks about forms form, like our kind of software is as a form builder.
So we have to call ourselves a form builder to a degree, just so that when people search for form builders they find us, but we think about ourselves internally as far more part of the no code movement.
So Paper form is all about providing the tools so that people can create their own solutions to their own problems.
We want to empower the everyday business owner to build their own solution, whether that's a client onboarding form or taking payments for a product that they want to try selling, as opposed to historically going to a web developer to make something custom for them or really trying to scratch their way through several different services at the same time.
We want Paperform to be as much of a one stop shop for that Creation experience as we can.
So while our primary focus is forms, the use cases of paper form kind of extend beyond that, if that makes sense.
So that's been a really powerful way of positioning paper form as well that we're not just a form builder.
One of the ways we really drove that home early on was we focused a lot on payments.
So where other form builders might have the ability to, you know, charge a single price at the end of the, at the end of the form or maybe have a, have a list of additional prices to charge, we from the very beginning had say like a product field.
We could go in and configure, you know, your SKUs, your prices, your stock quantities.
We managed stock for you so you couldn't oversell what you're selling.
You could integrate Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, now Square, even square point of sales so that you could manage stock, take payments and do that all.
All in the context of a wider form experience, if that makes sense.
Omer (32:35.320)
Yeah.
So I'm curious, like in terms of how you got to that point was this, like from when you started out and you were looking at the competition and you had a very clear vision in your mind of what a product like this should be able to do.
Or maybe it wasn't totally clear, but you kind of had a general idea of where you wanted to take this.
Dean McPherson (32:58.140)
So I think we had an inkling early on from, like I said, I made forms for friends in the past, so I had an inkling that there was a gap in the space, that the form space in general was very focused around very specific use cases and there was nobody really trying to make a general purpose tool for, for people to be creative with.
I think that's at the heart of it.
Payments was I suppose, that specific niche pain point which we saw at the beginning.
But I think in terms of actually developing that into a full product vision, it's been really organic.
So while I can honestly say we had a vague idea of what the product could be when we first started building it, and even when we first launched it, it's only been for that iterative feedback process of people interacting with, with paper form, talking to our customers day in, day out that we've actually seen.
Oh, like wouldn't it be great if we could schedule a meeting on your Google Calendar from a question and manage availability?
So we thought that was a great idea.
It's not something that we'd seen in any other form builder before.
So we built it and we put it in and it's something that most People would probably expect, but as soon as that's in there, it opens up a whole nother range of possibilities of things that you can do because all of a sudden you can now book a meeting on your calendar and take a payment for that meeting and tie it in with the wider suite of features that we have within Paper Form.
And it's that kind of that organic cross pollination of functionality which I think provides a lot of creative value to our customers.
Omer (34:33.640)
Right, right.
So give me one example of like, I know you've been talking about no code, and there seems to be more of an emphasis on moving towards kind of being a solution for early stage SaaS products as well.
So just describe to me what that sort of use case looks like.
How would a founder of a SaaS business, early stage, could use Paper form?
Dean McPherson (35:02.549)
Absolutely.
So we get used by lots of early stage businesses, some SaaS, some just startups in general.
I think there's a lot of value in Paper form as kind of an MVP solution.
There's enough basic functionality around lots of different use cases that it makes a lot of sense to just use a tool like Paperform to create that experience as opposed to trying to build it manually.
So we see things from people from car rental services and that kind of thing.
Omer (35:36.680)
People.
Dean McPherson (35:37.480)
Any kind of use case where you might need a customer facing form through to, I've just got a simple product and I want to sell it, or we support subscriptions.
So just using a form as a simple way of capturing payment details to start a subscription in stripe, where you can then go and manage the rest of that subscription in stripe, all of those use cases really make sense.
So it gets people using us for like subscription boxes, for example, because they can create a form that's, that's a landing page that says, you know, you want to get sent fresh flowers every four weeks, sign up here and they can fill out that information, have it be visual and engaging and beautiful and look like their brand, create a subscription and then off you go.
You've got your MVP business up and running with a single form and a stripe account.
Omer (36:20.880)
Got it.
Okay, cool.
So let's talk about what you've learned along the way.
We sort of talked about hiring and what a difference that made to the business in the last couple of years.
I mean, I guess the obvious question is, do you look back at that and think we should have hired someone sooner?
Dean McPherson (36:41.890)
Yeah, absolutely.
I think especially in the context of being where we are now and acknowledging that stage, that we're not running a lifestyle business Here.
Or we might run it in a comfortable way sometimes.
But the end game isn't just to keep it as minimal work as possible.
So knowing that the business was going to end here, then definitely hiring earlier would have been hugely valuable in terms of just accelerating that initial growth rate and getting people that are really well suited to roles into those roles.
It's one of those things about being a founder where you always end up doing a lot of work, which you wouldn't normally expect to be doing.
Like, I'm a developer by trade, and here I am talking on a podcast.
It's not something I would have thought I would have been doing a year before I started Paper Form.
But as a founder, that kind of thing just is part and parcel of the job.
You end up saying you might come into it with one skill set, but you end up having to use a broad range of skill sets.
But I think what makes the temptation in the early days is because you kind of have to do everything.
You get comfortable with being in that stage of being a jack of all trades.
That's kind of what we fell into anyway.
But I think there's huge value in hiring people that are passionate and skilled in things, which you are not.
So for us, that was definitely growth, as can be seen by our growth.
Yeah.
Omer (38:06.190)
Okay.
Couple of other things I want to kind of talk about.
Number one is you don't have a freemium model.
You basically have a free trial, whereas I know at least some of the other alternatives I can think of.
Paper form do have some kind of freemium.
Was that something you tested?
It didn't work, or you've just.
It's been something you just didn't want to do for whatever reason.
Dean McPherson (38:29.640)
The latter, actually.
So we.
We thought about it pretty long and hard when we first launched the business, and part of it was because we were aiming for something that we could sustainably manage with just the two of us.
And the thing with a freemium model is it's noisy.
So.
So one of the things we really value as a business is, is our customer success.
And if you go and look up reviews on Paper form on any review site, there will be.
Oh, my goodness.
The support on Paper form is fantastic.
And that's something we really, really prioritize in terms of how we've grown the business.
Just about half of our team is customer success around the world who actively work with our customers to help them figure out how to make the right solutions to their problems.
So knowing that support was a really big priority for us.
The idea of having a free tier.
It works in some ways because obviously you get a lot of people in the product, but we wouldn't be able to support them like we can with people who are, who are actually evaluating the product to purchase.
We know that cost benefit payoff works from a financial perspective.
So it's okay for us to invest heavily in the business in support so that the people who actually do want to use and pay for paper form can actually have a better experience and that we don't have to chop and change between, oh, we don't let you talk to our support because you're not paying us.
Which is how Most of our SaaS businesses would probably approach that.
Problem is, you know, free tier, you get the help docs and you get left, left in the wild.
So we didn't want to not engage with our community.
So not offering a free tier was our way around that.
It also, yeah, generally keeps noise down.
You know, you know, if people are signing up to paper form, they at least have some intent that if they find the right solution, they're willing to enter in credit card details and continue with that.
Omer (40:16.230)
Now you don't, you don't ask for credit card upfront, you do it after the end of the trial.
Dean McPherson (40:20.580)
No, no, no.
At checkout.
Omer (40:21.940)
Did you ever try asking for a credit card up front?
Dean McPherson (40:24.580)
No, I personally don't think it's worth trying.
Omer (40:26.980)
I would keep the noise down.
Dean McPherson (40:28.420)
Yeah, yeah.
I don't think it sends a great message though.
Omer (40:32.660)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess it depends on kind of, you know, I guess different companies have different approaches on this.
I guess.
So I'm curious, like, what, what does your conversion look like from the 14 day trial?
Like what percentage of people who start a trial convert into a paying customer?
Dean McPherson (40:49.150)
Yeah, it'd depend on traffic source.
Absolutely.
So like we noticed when we scale out AdWords campaigns that our conversion rates will generally tank, for example, which is just, you know, how qualified is the intent of the traffic that's coming to your site.
So these days it's around, I think around 10% of qualified trials will sign up, but that'd vary very heavily depending on the channel.
Omer (41:15.270)
What's the best converting channel?
I assume it's high intent.
Dean McPherson (41:19.390)
Referral traffic is easily the highest converting.
It's like if somebody's coming from a list of best form builders, that would be well higher than a generic blog mention even or ads or any other traffic source.
Right?
Omer (41:37.840)
Yeah, there's always like, I mean, you know, Zapier does a good job of this.
Whenever you look for best online anything, they tend to have an article with a list of products that you can use and they do the same thing with form builders and you guys are on the list there.
So yeah, I think especially if someone's looking at through an article like that where they can say, oh, there's like, you know, nine different products I can choose from and I can, I don't have to go and do the research myself.
I can just research what you guys have done and tell me what, what's kind of the pros and cons.
It's like that, that's kind of pretty good in terms of.
They're doing a lot of the qualification for you with that post, I guess.
Dean McPherson (42:16.880)
Yeah, it's pre qualified traffic.
Omer (42:18.800)
Absolutely.
Dean McPherson (42:19.280)
It's, it's.
And like, why is somebody on that page in the first place?
Like at the end of the day, most search traffic, it all comes down to intent.
It's why somebody put that term into Google and clicked on that article.
And if they're looking at a list of best form builders, chances are they're evaluating form builders.
So if you've got a competitive offering and you can be on that list and they see that and you're represented well in the article as well, because that sometimes makes a difference, then obviously that's traffic that's going to come to you with.
I'm not just clicking around for fun or clicking on it because it looks like a fun, like an interesting link.
I'm clicking on it because I'm looking for a form builder solution for a specific need in my business right now.
You know that traffic's obviously going to convert better.
Omer (43:04.920)
All right, we should wrap up.
We're going to get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Are you ready?
Dean McPherson (43:13.400)
I'm ready.
Omer (43:13.960)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Dean McPherson (43:18.040)
I think that that focus is everything and it's something that's wrong.
True.
The larger we've got, the more opportunities there are that appear.
And knowing exactly where you want to go and focusing on the opportunities that align is harder to do than you think it would be because sometimes you get great opportunities that come up which are just in the wrong direction.
Focus Best advice.
Omer (43:45.030)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Dean McPherson (43:49.040)
Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
I found it a really interesting read and if I was to launch another business, I would probably take a lot of its advice under consideration.
I mean, the core premise is that doing something completely new, forging a new industry even is not inherently that much harder than starting any other business.
There's not inherently that much more risk and the reward is significantly different.
Anyway, it's a really interesting read.
It's got a good mind.
Omer (44:20.540)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Dean McPherson (44:24.780)
I think successful founders have to be happy to do things that they don't want to do and to have long term vision.
So happy to trade short term comfort for some kind of long term gain, whatever that looks like.
Omer (44:41.170)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or
Dean McPherson (44:43.850)
habit tool would be Notion.
I use Notion for kind of all of my personal management.
I actually manage all of my to do lists in a single page and always keep a primary focus section right up the top where I put no more than three things in there so that I don't get too distracted because focus is important.
Omer (45:08.090)
What's a new well, you kind of said this.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Dean McPherson (45:13.090)
Oh boy.
New crazy business idea.
This one's a hard one.
We're actually evaluating software for sales tax management globally at the moment and it's a really interesting space.
I'm not sure I would jump into it without doing a lot of research, but I think there's a whole lot of room for somebody to make sales something to simplify tax compliances for SaaS businesses globally.
Which sounds really dry and probably is really dry, but I think there's some incredible opportunities around there.
Omer (45:43.860)
Yeah, I think the opportunity is probably there.
I'm not sure I share your sentiment of calling it an interesting business, but maybe the opportunity is interesting.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Dean McPherson (45:59.950)
I can play the didgeridoo, but I haven't in a little while, so I wouldn't be great.
But I can play it.
Omer (46:07.870)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Dean McPherson (46:10.910)
Oh look, the big passion for me is family, obviously around Paper form with my wife.
So I work in a family setting just about all the time.
And we've got two young boys, a three year old and a one year old, so there's not a whole lot of room for other passions between running a business and having small children.
Yeah, and I wouldn't want there to be.
Anyway, they're both great.
Omer (46:34.630)
Awesome.
So if people want to check out Paper form, they can go to Paperform Co. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that.
Dean McPherson (46:45.670)
Twitter Dean McPherson or email Dean Paperform Co.
Although I get a lot of spam, so I'm sorry if I'm never reply.
I might just think you're trying to sell me something.
Omer (46:56.970)
Yeah, all right, cool.
Well, we'll include a link in the show notes to your Twitter and the email is reserved for people listening to the episode.
There we go.
Dean McPherson (47:09.850)
Just for you for making it this far.
Omer (47:12.170)
Exactly.
Dean McPherson (47:12.850)
Yeah.
Omer (47:13.530)
Thank you, Dean.
It's been a pleasure and congratulations on the success you've had so far.
Thanks for sharing the lessons you've learned along the way and wish you guys the best of success.
Dean McPherson (47:24.510)
Thanks so much, Emma.
It's been lovely.
Omer (47:26.270)
Awesome.
Cheers.
