Growform
The multi-step form builder that brings in up to 2x leads
Whoops, haven't updated for a while... sorry!
It's great to see indie form builders doing well over the last year. It goes to show, you can compete in a crowded niche as long as you serve one group of customers really well.
Growform has emerged as the form builder that gets you more leads. It's used by lead gen and conversion designers looking to squeeze more leads out of their landing pages for the same ad spend, and draws on my experience in CRO (conversion rate optimisation).
What's been working
- SEO: Pulling in 1k clicks per month according to search console. Haven't approached this with much strategy to be honest - just writing useful guides about lead generation, forms and best practices.
- Google ads: I spend a few hundred $ on Google ads. It's good for high intent searchers who re looking for a product just like mine.
- AppSumo: I made $10k+ on AppSumo over summer, which was useful from a cashflow perspective. This was overall a very positive experience, and led to lots of backlinks and a bump in traffic. It didn't lead to attributable MRR, since these customers are very price-sensitive, understandably so.
- New price points: Some users were getting 1k+ leads per month but still paying $39.99(!), so I started enforcing lead caps and moving them to new price plans. I've also closed a few larger deals that bring in many '000s of leads per month.
What hasn't been working
- Affiliates: The partner programme has only generated a handful of sales - it tends to be low quality spam/brand bidders.
- Reddit ads: I spent $100 on reddit ads as they have a free offer - no signups!
- Twitter: I probably don't tweet enough, or for the right audience... and this shows in the numbers - 2 attributable signups in a year!
While I'm here, I've added a Black Friday discount code - feel free to grab it for 40% off - BLACKFRI40
PPC (Google ads) and SEO continue to be the main acquisition channels, with a tiny bit of Facebook retargeting.
This milestone is really special to me as it brings me very close to ramen profitability in London. This means I'll be able to continue to focus on Growform full time without needing to find new work as a senior product manager (although it does feel weird turning down $15k/mo contracting gigs!).
Since the last update, I've had a couple of customers take out plans not mentioned on the marketing website, spending $200+ per month each.
These customers are typically markeitng agencies or lead gen companies who understand the importance of high-converting forms.
So, I'll continue to make Growform the #1 choice for lead generation companies and agencies who want to boost their conversion rate.
I'm super excited about launching native integrations in December, as this should start to attract customers from various app stores (mailchimp, etc)!
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Did you tried Capterra paid placement or just listed for free?
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Have tried Capterra paid, yes. You have to do a call with their salespeople (and pretend to be a little bigger than you are ;)) but it's worth it. I might try and write up the results for Indie Hackers next week.
The clicks are surprisingly high-converting IF you can get into the right category.
For reference, mine converted at a similar level to Google ads, but were slightly more expensive.
Hope that helps!
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Maybe it's more expensive than Google Ads because they literally run ads on Google Ads to bring traffic to their sponsored products.
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@harvellocapello love this post bud!
Can I tell you something? You have tapped into some magic and you don't even know it.
I own 2 SaaS companies doing over $200k ARR and our biggest struggle is customer acquisition. I am not shitting you, I send like 100 cold emails a day trying to drive traffic.
My point in telling you this is.... YOU are the first person I have EVER met that has made Google PPC profitable!
That means you make money while you sleep AND if you can keep it up your business is infinitely scalable.
Straight up... I am Jealous....
Crazy request here, but I would love to connect to chat about SaaS and PPC 😁
Thoughts?
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Hi @harvellocapello ! Congrats! 🎉 I am also experiencing the same feeling. I just passed the $2K MRR for my project. Can't wait to see you keep growing up to 10K or more. Keep it up.
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Thanks Thomas - it's an exciting place to be! Let's get to 10k!
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Hey Harvey - congrats on the progress man! Excited to see Growform grow :D
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Thanks David! Emailed you, let's catch up this week!
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Great news, congrats! Enjoying seeing this grow!
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This is awesome!
8-9 months since the first customer, Growform - my multi-step form builder - has reached $1,000 ($1,033 in fact) monthly recurring revenue.
Since the last update, on the acquisition side -
- Tried Capterra, which works to profitably deliver new customers
- Got on page 1 of Google for a few non competitive phrases (it really does take SEO a while to kick in)
- Launched on betalist, which delivered 20-30 signups, but no paid customers yet.
On the product side, I've added:
- Bunch of speed improvements to make the forms load really fast
- Hidden fields, so customers can send UTM parameters through
- A couple of really nice new templates with best-practices built in
- New fields, incl. time and date of birth.
I also recently quit my job as senior product manager at a prominent London tech startup, and will be working full time on Growform from 1st June - let's put fuel on the fire!
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Nice. I'm not having much luck with capterra, even sending 500 plus emails to review gets very little attention. Do you recommend the paying them ?
Today I added 3 new nice, responsive templates to Growform.
We got some feedback from users saying "All your templates look the same", so I wanted to add some that look a bit different and show off what the multi-step form builder can do.
Onwards and upwards!
Growform is up to 15 paying customers!
We also haven't had a single customer churn in 3-4 months, which is nice!
These customers came in purely through Google Ads and word of mouth.
Here's what I've been doing since the last update:
- Refining Google Ads campaigns and doubling down where they work
- Added Facebook retargeting for about $90 per month. It's ROI positive - do this!
- Tried targeted but cold email (no success yet)
- Listening / answering on Twitter
Marketing channels I still have yet to try properly:
- LinkedIn ads
- Facebook ads for acquisition
- Quora ads/organic
- Twitter ads
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Congrats! I've always thought that advertising for indie hackers was too expensive, interesting to see these results, I might check it out.
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Big congrats on hitting 500 MRR that’s awesome! How did you get started with Facebook retargeting? That sounds really interesting.
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Thanks @freezegun!
Fairly simple:
- Set up a Facebook pixel as normal, that fires on every page as well as key events (eg. signup)
- Create an audience, eg. "People who have viewed a page, but not signed up in the last 60 days"
- Create a new campaign with the audience set to the one you created above
- Don't sweat too much about the creative and text. Bright colours work well, but be sure to keep it in-line with your site look/feel.
- Set budget to something really small - even $1-2 a day is enough to get testing.
We get about 1k hits to the website a month and $90 seems more than enough for basic retargeting - in fact, I might even turn it down, as on average our ads have been seen 7 times per person...
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Very cool, thanks so much for your reply! Going to have to try this out.
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Hey Growform looks dope! You have an interesting pricing for Agencies at $67.47, wondering what was the thought process there?
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Thanks @jatin! Good question, I believe it's $74.99 * 0.9 (i.e. 10% discount for paying anually). Looks a bit weird next to the nice round figure, so will take that as feedback!
As far as pricing goes generally, the lower package is priced to be competitive with other form builders (incl. typeform), so accessible to anyone with a website. The higher price point (for agencies) is designed to provide more value - i.e. you get 5 domains instead of 1, but not 5x higher.
Pricing is definitely something I'd like to review over time; getting it to be both affordable for customers and profitable for the company is a tough balancing act!
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Got it. I think having a strikeout to explain the pricing would be a good idea :)
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Got my first paying customer - a flower wall hire company(!) who took part in the closed beta. The founder has noticed a huge uptick in leads thanks to the shiny new form.
I built a few custom features for this customer, so need to incorporate these into the product.
Although it's amazing to have a paying customer (woop!), I realised I need to focus on AGENCIES as these guys:
1.) Understand the benefit of multi-step forms and how much better they convert (the flower wall company was kind of being polite trying it out at first) and
2.) Come up against the problem day in, day out - because they're constantly creating new forms for clients all the time.
I think if I can target the right customers, I can charge 5x as much (and provide much more value!)
I launched the Growform closed beta as soon as possible, skipping out as many features as possible (but probably polishing it too much).
I wanted to add 30+ high-converting templates to the platform to cover a wide variety of industries, but went ahead and launched with just 10 - if anyone wants an industry that isn't listed, I'll design one for them with my handy CRO experience!
I've asked a few friends, LinkedIn contacts and members of closed Facebook groups to join - so I had 5 quality beta users from the start.
I'm going to have to be careful with how many invites I send out, as it's already getting time-consuming adding small features and fixing bugs in the editor.
Having coded dozens of multi-step forms over the years, I got to the point I realised I was wasting my time.
I started building Growform to scratch my own itch - to make it as easy as possible to build high-performing forms that look awesome and convert really well.
4 Comments
Exciting! Congratulations on the huge jump, that's awesome!
Thank you! I kinda forgot to update progress for a while, so it was really lots of little jumps over about a year xD
Awesome, thanks for sharing. Seems like your SEO is what has been working.
Do you find your tech stack plays a role in this, I..e server, rendered vs client-rendered content. congrats on your 5k mrr.
Thanks mate!
No, I don't think tech stack played any role in my SEO - in fact, it's all just hosted on a Wordpress site with a decent caching plugin.
That said, I've heard some awesome success stories (talking to indie hackers IRL) using server side rendering to create very scaleable programattic SEO strategies 🚀