Paperform

Paperform Update: How We Grew Revenue 75% And Just Hit $2.7M ARR

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Diony McPherson

Founder, Paperform

$218K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Paperform

paperform.co

from Sydney NSW, Australia

started November 2016

$218,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Diony recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Paperform? Check out these stories:

1. How This Couple Bootstrapped A $1.5M ARR Online Form Builder (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Paperform. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Paperform is a flexible online form builder that combines thoughtful and beautiful design with serious digital smarts. We launched in 2016 to transform the way small businesses do work.

My founder and husband, Dean, and I wanted to help people like us automate busy work and free up time to do things that matter. We started Paperform as a lifestyle business - something that could support us financially while we grew our family. You can read more about our early growth here.

Paperform has evolved from a form builder into a digital Swiss Army Knife for its supportive community of users. We’ve created something that allows users to build beautiful and brainy solutions with limitless potential. With uses spanning everything from design agencies, and legal and accounting firms, to interactive escape rooms, and yoga studios, the business is now approaching $3M in annual recurring revenue with more than 20 team members spread across the globe.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Paperform has been going from strength to strength. We’ve been fortunate to have a business that remains stable and is growing despite everything that’s going on in the world. Since we’ve last talked:

Have grown by 75% since we last spoke and are now at $2.7M ARR
Our Team has grown from 15 to 20 FTEs
We’ve processed over $100M in revenue for our customers
We’ve rebranded
Oh yeah, we had twins, so we’ve grown from 2 to 4 kids since we last spoke!

2021 was a strange year; our industry (SaaS) saw a slowing in sales following the 2020 Covid tech boom. We were able to achieve consistent growth throughout the year, and 2022 has seen business start to boom again. We’re excited about the future!

Businesses need at least one founder who cares too much - someone who hates to see the little things not done right and who is willing to hold on to their values like a dog with a bone. But they need to do this with grace and humility.

One of our proudest achievements has been our rebrand. We’ve always known who we are as a company - what we stand for; what we want to achieve. But we haven’t always been sure how to best share that with the world. We couldn’t be more proud of our new look as it better represents our values, our product, and our beloved community.

Getting to know our users was the basis of this rebrand. Creating a new visual identity wasn’t just about refreshing our logo and colors; it was about better representing the countless creative solutions that our users have created with the product.

Hone your instincts. Learn how to rely on your decision-making abilities. Consider the experiences you have had and are having and learn from them. Practice critical thinking. It’s becoming a lost art and contributing to a loss of common sense.

A massive amount of research and thought went into our rebrand. Paperform’s new logo reflects our position as a digital Swiss Army Knife for small businesses - an all-in-one multitool that comes in handy in almost any situation. The kaleidoscopic badge represents the diversity of its digital tools to create an infinite number of beautiful solutions. Yellow is now our hero color, and we’ve got a softer, muted color scheme to create a sense of lightness and ease.

This rebrand has allowed us to communicate our message and attract users that are more likely to convert to paid leads. The buzz generated from the launch also raised awareness for our brand and attracted people to the Product. We’ve now been recognized as part of design awards, like the CSS Design Awards for 2022. That recognition is important in solidifying Paperform’s authority and integrity in web design - we know how to make pages and forms that engage and elicit a response.

We’ve also continued to double down on our inbound marketing and partnerships. Our emphasis on good design has brought us big and wonderful partners, like Adobe. We were able to partner with them and bring Adobe Create Cloud libraries into our Product, creating an ecosystem of tools for shared audiences. We have several product partnerships that are yielding excellent brand awareness and the right audiences, which is having an evergreen impact on growth. More importantly, we have revenue share agreements that mean we have new and scalable sources of income coming via our partnerships.

We’ve relied less on channels like paid ads more recently, as it’s becoming more and more competitive and not worth the ROI. We see great results in other channels, so it’s better to invest in those on a limited budget. We continue to keep our customers engaged by releasing new features every month - we keep that value at the forefront!

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Being able to predict the market and work out seasonality has been difficult at times. The world has experienced several global events that make it hard to determine what normal spending habits look like and to be able to respond to true seasonality. Spending always drops when a major world event is first announced, and it’s easy to freak out and think “Well, it was fun while it lasted”. But we’ve learned that if you have a sustainable business, customers return to their normal habits quickly.

Learn how to argue well. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in their field, and allow them the room to disagree with you. Let go of your ego, but fight for things you care about.

It pays to never panic - those moments are a great opportunity to develop a thick skin, and to consider how you can respond in an agile way should the same thing ever happen again (no more pandemics though please). Growing that little bit slower and giving yourself room to learn from your challenges on the fly allows you to build a sustainable and resilient business.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

As our company has grown it’s become incredibly harder to have a balance between family and work. As business owners, the danger is that you could always be doing more in the business. Succeeding doesn’t change that either, you just end up getting fired up from increased growth and it can become easy to neglect the other parts of your life that are important. One of the advantages of running a business with my spouse is that we are at the same stage of life and inherently understand what this pressure is like.

Dean and I sat down recently and put some measures in place both in business and at home to help us restore the balance in favor of our personal and family life. We’ve defined very clear work hours, coordinated how we’ll take care of the kids outside of professional care, created a roster of meals, and hired a cleaner. We have the privilege of affording help - I recognize this isn’t always possible for everyone, but if you can afford a little help, it’s worth the time you get back with your family and friends. We’ve got four kids aged four, three, and eight-month-old twins, so we needed to hire some extra arms!

We’re also shifting our focus from doing more of the day-to-day work and ensuring we’re leading our Team in a way that gives them ownership and responsibility for their work. We need to ensure they are independent enough to make day-to-day decisions without us that are on-brand and within strategic vision.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

2021 was all about setting good foundations in place to allow for growth. We consolidated our brand, did loads of research, restructured our company structure to optimize for global compliance, and got our Team running like a well-oiled machine. Now it’s time to sprint!

Everything we do at Paperform is centered around the desire to facilitate a world where small business owners spend less time on work and more time on the things that matter. With each new feature we’ve added to the Product we’ve strayed further from being a form builder, but edged closer to our mission of empowering small business owners to concentrate on the bits of their business they love while freeing up more time to enjoy life.

We’re no longer just a form-building tool. We’re much more. We’re the way you stay on schedule. The way you sell products. The way you keep organized, get paid, understand customers, and entertain your audience. We’re the way you tip the work/life balance back toward life. We just happen to be a form builder too.

From 2022 onwards we are opening up Paperform to an enterprise market and expanding our product offering. I can’t say more than that - we have very ambitious plans for the future!

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

I started following Janna Bastow on Twitter. She’s a no-nonsense tech founder with fantastic advice and insights into how to grow and run a good business.

I also started listening to The Startup Podcast with Chris Saad and Yaniv Bernstein. They are an Aussie duo who discuss all things associated with building, running, and investing in Silicon valley style startups. They are very down-to-earth and extremely clever and have reputable and impressive guests on their show.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Solid businesses take time to grow. If your ambition is to create a unicorn at lightning speed, then I’m not the advisor for you. If you want to create a Rhino, then I have a lot of opinions. My advice hasn’t changed since our last post; it’s been reinforced since then:

Firstly, get your house in order! If you are serious about your business, nail a company structure, sort out your company establishment, do research when it comes to selecting a business name, and seek to protect it early on. Think about how you are going to manage and record expenses. Consider at what point you should get insurance. Legal, finance, and insurance are the backbone of your business. Spend time organizing these well.

There are brilliant and cost-effective apps to help you here now:

Xero for bookkeeping,
Deel for hiring,
Stripe + TaxJar for accepting payments.

Most importantly, hone your instincts. Learn how to rely on your decision-making abilities. Consider the experiences you have had and are having and learn from them. Practice critical thinking. It’s becoming a lost art and contributing to a loss of common sense.

Learn how to argue well. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in their field, and allow them the room to disagree with you. Let go of your ego, but fight for things you care about. Businesses need at least one founder who cares too much - someone who hates to see the little things not done right and who is willing to hold on to their values like a dog with a bone. But they need to do this with grace and humility.