JotForm gave Steve Hartert a juicy chunk of equity to convince him to leave his own marketing consultancy and join the company as the CMO. Online forms are one of the key conversion points for businesses ranging from agencies to enterprise-level SaaS products, and talented heads are hard at work trying to figure out how to make them better.
Nathan Latka sat down with Steve Hartert, VP of enterprise operations at Jotform. He provides the inside scoop on their unique branding and marketing performance with these key facts:
- Increased customer base by 50% during first 18 months as CMO
- 1.1m organic clicks due to lean, mean content marketing
- Customers in over 192 countries
Nathan Latka (00:00):
Hey, folks. My guest today is Steve Hartert. He’s the vice president of enterprise operations at Jotform, with responsibilities that include marketing, brand, and corporate partnerships. Before Jotform, he was president at Hartert and Associates, a marketing consultancy that worked with B2B and B2C SaaS companies. He’s got more than 30 years of experience in the space with companies like the Walt Disney Company, Ministry of Transport in Australia and Blue Cross CA. All right, Jotform.com., Steve, you ready to take us to the top?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (00:24):
Let’s go for it.
Nathan Latka (00:26):
Now, just so people understand the origin story here, you are not an original cofounder, right? How did you get involved, what year?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (00:33):
I’ve been with Jotform since March of 2016, is when I started working here. I started off as in the marketing side, helping them build up the marketing department as the CMO. And then, I guess, about four years ago now, we decided we wanted to start up a new division for enterprise and was asked to head up that part of it. As that grew, I had to leave the marketing side alone, and then kind of move over to help grow this new division.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (01:04):
So I think if you looked at the headcount, I want to say I’m probably in the first 50 employees that were hired for the company, so I’ve seen us grow from where we were to we’re closing in on 400 employees now.
Nathan Latka (01:19):
That’s incredible. I mean, and just to put that in revenue terms, you joined before you guys broke 40 million bucks in AR. You’re over 100 million now today, right?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (01:29):
I can’t comment on revenue.
Nathan Latka (01:31):
Those are public. That 100 million number you guys put out in a press release, I believe. Let me pull up the source on that and read it. Hold on.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (01:38):
Okay.
Nathan Latka (01:39):
Let me make sure I’m getting that right. But point being though, you’ve seen revenue grow, not just headcount growth, you’ve also watched significant revenue growth, as well.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (01:47):
Oh, yeah. We’ve seen incredible revenue growth across all aspects.
Nathan Latka (01:54):
Let’s go and talk about that, right? 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 boot strap, very capital efficient. What’s been your guys’ go-to-market? How have you grown the user base?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (02:07):
We’re bootstrapped. We’ve never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere. All of our growth has been purely organic. What we’ve focused on, really, is delivering a good, solid, high quality product, and making the user experience good. But our marketing has really been revolving around SEO. We have really planted our flag on the SEO side and have used that and leveraged that tremendously across all different types of platforms. I mean, not only just in, say, traditional text types of content but also in video content, has been very big for us, also.
Nathan Latka (02:44):
What does that mean? How do you think about video SEO?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (02:47):
Well, I mean, video you can use the descriptions inside of things like YouTube and other types of channels. And then the video is what helps draw people in. So you can use things like a transcript of what your video is, whether it’s a two-minute demo video or a four or five-minute newsletter video or a very much of a long form type of a podcast video, those kinds of things. You can include those transcripts in different places, and that helps drive the SEO traffic.
Nathan Latka (03:14):
Now, I’m on you guys’ YouTube page today. It looks like 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 search traffic research going into that.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (03:31):
Yeah, a lot of it’s brainstorming internally, but we also look at what our customers are asking for through our support channel. So if they’re asking just the 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 of our other materials that come with it.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (03:54):
And the benefit of things like the video is 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 could be posted. The shelf life might be just a couple of months, and then that gets kind of archived. But video lives forever, basically.
Nathan Latka (04:13):
Oh, what’s going on there YouTube. Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I’ve done manually. Saves you a lot of time.
Nathan Latka (04:27):
Well, we’ve done this. We’ve built that into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I’ll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in. You connect your Stripe account. You see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past 88 days, and even set goals for valuation this year.
Nathan Latka (04:45):
Now, the secret to valuation is there’s many different ways to value a SaaS business. The reason you’re going to see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who’s doing the buying of your SaaS company, you’re going to get a different valuation. A VC’s going to pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you’re going to do a minority sale, that’s different. And if you sell the whole business, that’s a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC pays. Yellow is what private equity. And red is if you sold the whole thing outright.
Nathan Latka (05:21):
Now, what’s cool about this is this is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So TRACTIAN, 1.2 million seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired … the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you’re going out right now and you’re raising your seed round. Well, go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold.
Nathan Latka (06:01):
There’s never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we’re thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we’re going to go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you want to check this tool out, if you want to jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link: founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on Get Your Valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform, I hope to see you there. All right, let’s jump back into the interview.
Nathan Latka (06:38):
That makes sense. Okay, so there’s a video playbook here. There’s an SEO playbook here. What does your SEO team look like today? Is it in house or outsourced?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (06:45):
It’s all internally.
Nathan Latka (06:47):
So how many folks would you say are on that team? What are sort of the roles look like?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (06:51):
Well, I mean, we’ve got a couple of dozen people that are doing it on the SEO side, but I mean, really what it comes down to is they look at … They’re constantly pouring over the keywords that people are looking at, how they’re finding us, what types of phrases they’re looking for, not only just in a general sense, but also based on a 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 things.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (07:18):
We build our SEO around those types of locations. We can actually identify little pockets of populations that are looking for specific types of forms. And then around that then, we can wrap content around that that helps address those SEO components.
Nathan Latka (07:33):
Yep. Actually, you were right. Because it was back in 2017 when we last spoke, so a while ago. You had told me that customers could get on, and on average were paying about 300 bucks a month for Jotform. Has that stayed pretty consistent? Is the ARPU still about 300 bucks a year?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (07:49):
Again, I’m not going to comment specific dollars on revenue, but I mean, our revenue base has continued to grow as we’ve added on top of this-
Nathan Latka (07:55):
Sorry, sorry, I’m not asking about revenue. I’m talking about if someone listening right now, I’m trying to help them market here. Someone listening right now wants to use Jotform, what are they going to probably pay on average per month?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (08:05):
Well, I mean, again, they can use our single plans, or what we call our Bronze, Silver, Gold plans, which are our single-user plans. Those are listed on the website, where high is $99 a month to $39 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. That starts … It’s about $7200 a year for that, without HIPAA compliance and things like that. So it depends on what your needs are as part as what somebody’s actually going to be invested in the product.
Nathan Latka (08:36):
Okay, but the cheapest price point I just heard you mention was 39 bucks a month. So that’s the starting point.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (08:40):
Correct, yeah … or a freemium model. We also have a free model, or a free product that people can actually use. Like anything else, it’s limited to a certain number of forms and submissions you can get every month. But allows people to test it out, basically dip their toe in the water, and see if the product works for them. We find that people generally look at that, and then once they get that test because it’s low risk for them, they will jump all over it. Then they want to start moving up through our paid platforms.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (09:04):
And again, it’s consumption based. So the more you use it, the higher up in the pricing tier somebody would have to move, but we’ve found that people are very agreeable to that because it allows them to actually find a pricing point that fits their needs.
Nathan Latka (09:18):
Mailchimp, 2,000 free emails. Product-led growth is an important. Obviously, finding what the metric is and how much to give away free is challenging. I imagine, obviously, you’re always testing this. But talk to me about the process you use to make sure what you give away in the free tool is just enough but not too much.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (09:35):
Yeah, I mean, we also look at usage. We look at how people are using the product, how people are consuming it across all different platforms for us. Whether it’s domestically here in the US, or if somebody’s in Canada or Italy, France, Australia, wherever, we look at how they’re using it. So we’ve been able to identify where this division is between what we would consider, say, kind of just a light user, that’s a casual user. Maybe it’s somebody that’s a very small business, or they just have very light needs. To where somebody’s actually using it to drive their business, whether it’s e-commerce, or they’re using it to take orders online or they’re using it for taking reservations or something like that. And we’ve been able to identify where that division actually happens. And then so from that point, we’ve been able to put it in those pricing tiers as a result of that.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (10:21):
For example, our free plan, you’re allowed up to five forms. You get 100 submissions a month per form. So if somebody’s a … Again, that’s a fairly light kind of a user that doesn’t have a … Maybe it’s a small school. Maybe it’s a small nonprofit, something like that. You just don’t have a lot of demand, but it works for you. But then again, as your business grows, or as your organization grows, then you can just move up the plan ladder if that’s what you need to do.
Nathan Latka (10:46):
And how many submissions per form do you allow on the free plan?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (10:52):
You get 100 per form.
Nathan Latka (10:52):
- So if you have five forms, 100 submissions, it’s 500 submissions basically, is the max?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (10:56):
Well, yeah, in total. But I mean, you get 100 per form, so if that form hits its 100, then it’s basically that form kind of caps out for that month’s free.
Nathan Latka (11:03):
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 hit that 100 mark, and then they convert, no touch?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (11:11):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because once they hit that, they’ll log in, and they’ll get just a display pops up … If they’re logged into our system, then they’ll get a display that says, “Hey, you’ve reached your maximum number of submissions for the month. To continue, you need to upgrade to what would be our Bronze plan.” And then at that point, then if they say, “Yes, I could.” 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.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (11:38):
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 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.
Nathan Latka (11:53):
And Steve, how do you look at this data coming in every month, every year, every week and basically go, “Okay, is 100 the right now? Or should it be 1,000? Or should it be 10?” Do you reverse engineer and say, “We want 5% of users to convert,” and then you just toggle by based off that? Or how do you do that?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (12:09):
What we do is we look at where that number is. We look at our numbers on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. But we look at them on a daily basis, and then we aggregate them across different … the geographies versus the timeframes. We might look at, again, what’s going on on Australia on a monthly basis versus what’s going in Canada on a monthly basis, those kinds of things.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (12:28):
But we find it’s fairly consistent for us. Sometimes it depends on what the industry is somebody’s using. For example, during the last couple of years with COVID, healthcare use exploded, right? I mean, they needed it, and desperately needed it, because they suddenly had to go to 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 a year. So you could just get in there and do what you had to do to help people.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (13:07):
So those kinds of things we look at, but then we also look at that and go, “Well, how are people consuming the product?” That’s really what it comes back down to. And so we always look at it, but we found that the thresholds where people need to move have remained consistent because we find that those seem to be pretty good barometers of how we want to move things along.
Nathan Latka (13:27):
Well, what is that barometer? Maybe this isn’t specific to Jotform, specifically, but when you look at like Typeform, others in this space, now they’re just, frankly, PLG tools that have a big freemium 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 1%, 5%, 10%?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (13:43):
Well, I think everybody wants to get a higher than they can. I mean, a good 5% is about the industry average it seems like for a free … And I’m talking about all SaaS products, not just in the form world. But a 5% conversion rate seems to be pretty solid for people. And it varies. Some people can be even smaller because they can be down to one quarter. What they’re trying to do is get as many people into the pipes, so they’re doing it on a volume basis.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (14:07):
But about a 5% conversion rate I think is about the industry average. We look at that to see how do we stack up against that industry. And again, it varies. Some months are better than others, and some months … But everybody seems to kind of bubble along that certain 5% threshold.
Nathan Latka (14:24):
But true or false, if you had six months go by where you were at 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, would you change something about the freemium paywall to try and get back up above five?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (14:34):
No, not necessarily. I mean, we would look at it and go, “Is it just a certain industry? Is it some other kind of economic condition? What would be causing that?” But the point is, we don’t want to sit there and keep adjusting that threshold because then that becomes confusing to our customers, because they’ll say, “Wait a second. Last month it was this. This month it’s that.” And now you’ve got people all over the place on different kinds of tiers. That just leads to a lot of confusion for people.
Nathan Latka (14:59):
Yep. Now, I believe you guys did celebrate publicly on your blog, you guys … Well, first off, when you joined, how many total users, because you just celebrated a 10 million milestone right? Do you remember what the growth is?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (15:10):
As far as what do you mean growth? For customer base?
Nathan Latka (15:13):
No, no, no, with just users, what you guys already publish, right? So when you joined in 2016, what was the total number of users?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (15:19):
We were probably around, I want to say, were probably … I think we had just done about three million users.
Nathan Latka (15:25):
Okay. Wow. And then you guys celebrated nine million I believe in 2020. And you announced 10 million here this year. Is that correct?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (15:30):
Correct.
Nathan Latka (15:32):
That’s great. So is that sort of the goal for this year, just keep adding a million new users per year?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (15:38):
Actually, we’re growing faster than that. I mean, our numbers continue to climb.
Nathan Latka (15:43):
Wow.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (15:43):
And again, the COVID world has really kind of turned the entire business industry upside-down. A lot of people came to us during the last two years because they needed something. And they needed a product that could actually help them collect information without having to be face to face with people like kind of the olden days were.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (16:05):
So what they ended up doing was they just kind of went into almost a panic mode, and they said, “Hey, I need a free registration form. I need a patient intake form,” things like that. And that’s where SEO came into the mix and then helped drive the traffic to us and then convert those people to users, and then eventually into paid users.
Nathan Latka (16:25):
And Steve, in terms of price point of your cheapest plan today, $39 a month, was it always 39, or did you test $5 a month early on or 20 bucks a month? What does that look like?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (16:35):
We started off at around … I think it was $19 a month at one point. I mean, we have sales during the course of the year too. We’ll have a big end-of-year sale where we discount it. We also have a discount for nonprofits and education users, those types of things.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (16:50):
But it’s really come down to is we look at what the competition’s doing. We look at what our costs are, because I mean, obviously, you can’t have a price from five years ago and have it be consistent today just because our cost of business goes up as well as everybody else’s goes up.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (17:07):
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 have really complaints from customers if a price goes up, because what we do, also, is when people are on a previous plan they grandfather in at that plan, or grandfather in at that price. Our existing customer base does not really get impacted by price increases.
Nathan Latka (17:35):
I see. New.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (17:36):
It’s always going to be new incoming types of customers.
Nathan Latka (17:38):
Yeah. You don’t want to obviously market your competitors on the show, but just for my own to understand the world you’re playing in, I mean, who do you consider in your same space?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (17:47):
Well, I mean, some of the ones that we always run into, you got your Formstacks and your Typeforms. Those are the ones we always run into. I mean, there’s Cognito Forms and there’s Wofoo come in the mix every so often. But we also run in people that use Google Forms and Microsoft Forms. Even though those two are free products, what we have found, people look at those and they … Particularly like Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, they say they’re fairly limited in what they can do, and they need something more sophisticated. And so they turn to us looking for assistance.
Nathan Latka (18:18):
Which of these two things … You’ve been at the company now for, well, approaching eight years I think. Which of these two things do you think is more likely to happen first? The company bootstraps its way and breaks 150 million bucks of AR? Or the company bootstraps growth and decides, you know what, there’s a big opportunity here. Let’s go public, raise money, maybe buy up the competitors, grow faster? Which one do you think is more likely?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (18:39):
Probably the first one. I think the first one-
Nathan Latka (18:40):
Okay, so you guys love the bootstrapping more?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (18:43):
Yeah. I mean, that’s really kind of been our mantra since day one. That’s our CEO’s whole methodology to it. And it’s worked great for us. I mean, some companies, it doesn’t work for them, but for us, it has been absolutely perfect. There’s definitely benefits to not having investor money on the side because you just don’t have a lot of competing interest from a board of directors’ perspective. We can look at things, and we can talk as a group, determine what we want to do, and we can just focus on it. So if we need to turn on a dime, we don’t need to justify it to a board of directors or something like that. We can do what we need to do and get it done.
Nathan Latka (19:19):
Any products coming down the pipeline? If you guys have 10 million users, and you converted 5% … Now, this is probably high, but let’s say you have 500,000 paid customers. If you sell them a $20 a month new product that goes nicely with their forms, that’s a lot of revenue expansion. Do you have a second or third product coming down the pipeline?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (19:34):
We’re always looking at adding new features. But as far as new products go, I can’t comment on what we’ve got in the pipeline. But we definitely have always got new features coming up. We’re looking at different types of payment integrations. We’re looking at making different types of back-end feature adjustments for people, like how to pull your data out, how to analyze your data better on the back-end types of system.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (19:54):
It’s one thing to get all your data, but we want to have better tools in place to help people kind of analyze the data. So we’ve built or rebuilt our interfaces so it looks almost like a spreadsheet type of model so people can actually look at things easier. They can sort it out. They can … whatever types of parameters they want to work with. And then also push that data into other types of products, whether it’s a CRM or something else that people want to work with.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (20:21):
But it’s making very easy-to-use dashboards, making things very, very user friendly, those types of things. We’re kind of taking the no-code environments to heart on this and making it really, really simple for people to kind of customize their experience, not only in the front end where they’re building forms, but also on the back end when they’re trying to interpret all that data.
Nathan Latka (20:41):
Steve, last question here before we wrap up with a famous five. Fill in the blank here. Sometime in the past six months, you tested X channel with $10,000 of spend, and the results surprised you. What’s X?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (20:53):
Billboards.
Nathan Latka (20:54):
Billboards? How do you even track a billboard conversion?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (20:59):
You can do it. You just got to be really-
Nathan Latka (21:01):
How-
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (21:01):
You got to be good at it, I mean, because you can put them in certain regions. You don’t just blast like here in San Francisco where we’re located. You don’t hit the entire Bay Area. You might just focus on a real specific neighborhood, say, down 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.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (21:24):
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 cay say, “Hey, look, this generated X amount of business for us, so there’s potential in here.”
Nathan Latka (21:37):
What is a monthly cost to get a big billboard in like San Mateo? I just have no idea. Is it like five grand a month? Or are they really expensive?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (21:43):
It’s all over the place. Okay? I can’t give you a definitive price because it varies on traffic, size of billboard, how long you’re going to be there. There’s a whole lot of variables in there.
Nathan Latka (21:52):
How do you even get that data? Do you work with a broker? Is there a website people go to, like billboardpricing.com? Or-
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (21:57):
Oh, well, you go to the billboard company. Usually it’s like Clear Channel. It was like the biggest beast on the block when it comes to billboards. But you can go to Clear Channel, for example, and say, “Hey, we’re looking at this billboard on this street. Can you give us information on it?”
Nathan Latka (22:11):
Wow.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (22:12):
Again, it depends on the size of the board and which direction it’s facing, those kinds of things, because it all comes down to eyeballs. And so you want to maximize your eyeballs that you’re going to get on that thing. So they can look at it, and they know how much traffic goes by at a given point during the day, how many times … If it’s one of these electronic billboards where it’s going to be revolving with other ads, you’re going to get these many types of placements in a day and things like that. So again, the price varies depending on really the specific geography where that billboard’s going to be located at.
Nathan Latka (22:46):
Now I’m clicking through all the pictures of your billboards in Google Image results. Jotform, Powerful Forms, purple background, white text, rock and roll. So very simple branding. That’s nice. Okay, let’s wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (22:58):
Boy, favorite book. Boy, I’ve read so many lately, but I think probably one of my favorite books is the Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. A lot of really good business tips are in that book.
Nathan Latka (23:13):
Number two, is there a CEO you’re following or studying?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:17):
I still love to follow Tim Cook. The guy has got an incredible mind for business. He’s doing quite well there.
Nathan Latka (23:25):
Number three, what’s your favorite online tool for building Jotform, besides your own?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:32):
For building Jotform?
Nathan Latka (23:32):
Yeah. Like a business tool.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:34):
Google Sheets.
Nathan Latka (23:35):
Yeah, okay. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:39):
About five.
Nathan Latka (23:40):
Okay. And Steve, what’s your situation? Married, single, kiddos?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:43):
I am married. We have a combined family. There’s five total children in the family.
Nathan Latka (23:48):
Oh, wow. Okay. And how old are you?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:53):
I am 62 years old now.
Nathan Latka (23:53):
62 years young. Last question, something you wish you knew when you were 20?
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (23:58):
Just be better at financing. From the business side of things, is I wish I had paid more attention in my finance classes because money is what makes the world go round. As a marketer, the more you understand how money works, the better a marketer you really are.
Nathan Latka (24:11):
Guys, there you have it. Steve joined Jotform back in the early days, 2016, when they were around three million users. Now today, over 10 million users. He’s trying to figure out, okay, let’s make sure we get around a 5% conversion free to pay. That’s what he calls the industry average. But he’s leading the marketing team there today as they continue to scale up into hundreds of thousands of customers, all bootstrapped, which we love. Steve, thanks for taking us to the top.
Jotform VP Steve Hartert (24:32):
My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
