What is Typeform's moat?
Someone recently asked me this and a 2-liner didn't do justice, so here are the details
Typeform is the market leading Online Form Builder. It is also a leader in Online Survey Form category where it has earned the badge of a tool "optimised for quick response" -source G2
When I first came across Typeform, back in 2015, I was blown away. It was a feedback form for a service, and the user experience was impressively delightful. I actually thought it was custom form, made by a good marketing agency, for that company. While I was wondering why would the service invest so much on just a feedback form, there it was, right at the end, "powered by Typeform". This is a Product!! Wow!
What’s Different?
The User Experience
Forms on mobile were a nightmare back then. On a mobile browser, selecting a dropdown field involved so many taps that I gave up on any form having more than 3 questions. And here this was, a ‘one question at a time’ experience, with all options shown right in front of me. The second I made a choice a swish interaction showed me the next question. I was able to answer forms with 4 times as many questions in half the time. Today, their average form completion rate is 57%, irrespective of the form-content. Brilliance of a good UX, in numbers.
I opened the Order Form template in both Google forms and Typeform and the difference still persists
They started as a conversational data-collection platform with free-beta in 2013 and by the start of 2017, Typeform had more than 10 million responses submitted on the platform every month. This was an effect of an exceptional new take on the user experience and virality.
Viral effects:
Data-collection forms are inherently viral. Once people build them, they are shared with a large target audience. This audience is automatically exposed to the brand, powering the form. I filled one, I liked the experience and then I sent one to the thousands of users of a B2C company, I was working with. The response rate of a 7 question survey (1 free text question) was phenomenal. In more than 30% of the responses, there was a verbose feedback given for the free-text question. All questions were optional and yet 85% of them were answered. One tap to answer the question and one tap to skip it, made it as easy to answer than not.
Typeform feeds these virality with a generous free version and branding at the end of every free form. The result: the product advertises itself. This effect was so powerful that by 2017, every 2 new sign-ups was generating another new sign-up.
The viral effect was followed up by making onboarding extremely simple. They introduced templates for the most common use-cases: feedback form, lead generation, ordering, registration, quizzes; name it and it's there. The templates and guides were such that they elevated user’s status. They enabled the user to be better at their job.
Constant Innovation
While a large initial user-base gives some protection against incumbents, it doesn't sustain it. What sustains it, is constant innovation and that's what Typeform is consistently good at. Hats off to the team at Typeform, for analysing personas deeply.
If you have ever created a data-collection form, you know the balancing act of getting the maximum out from the couple of minutes you get. Too many questions and users would never answer; too less and the feedback doesn't show any direction. Typeform introduced ‘Logic Jumps’ so now one could change what comes next based on a previous answer. Keep the questions less and get the max out. Win win.
With chatbots gaining popularity, I could see the similarity between the two domains and was literally waiting for Typeform to come out with a way to convert the forms into a chat experience. And they launched: Conversations. Embed them on your website for a seamless look and then integrate it with hubspot or a CRM platform for a quick alternative to Intercom. They regularly innovated with features and integrations for their business audience. And this brings me to two things: Integrations and Pricing.
Integrations & API strategy
Even with quick onboarding and delightful innovation, retention in enterprise clients in tricky. New products get labelled as experimental and nice; but replaceable tools. Long-term commitments for a steady ARR becomes difficult. The key to break this, is to become so deeply embedded within a company's systems and processes, that the client can't imagine an experience without our product.
Quick and easy integrations reduce barriers towards this. Given the diversity of use-cases that Typeform gets applied in; this is an uphill task. For the most common downstream products (mailchimp, hubspot etc), they have a bunch of integrations natively provided in the product. And for the rest, they opened up their APIs to the developer ecosystem.
The API strategy has bifold benefits.
It allows picky clients to customise every nuance of the product according to their protocols and desires. Our product becomes almost indistinguishable in their ecosystem and hence, raises the severance cost and impact.
The long-tail of integration requirements begets the need of a development partner ecosystem, who can develop the integrations with the company. This ecosystem also brings it's own positive network effects with it.
Typeform is investing heavily into maturing this developer/product partner ecosystem. This is not just for building the integrations. This community becomes the experts community. They help clients with specific build requirements, launch quickly and without resource investments.
Pricing
Looking at Typeform's pricing page, they have a plan for each stage of business: small, medium and enterprise. They grow with their clients in two ways. Either the client’s reach increases and thereby the number of responses per month cross the plan's threshold. Or the client's processes get better and with that, the need to connect with other products comes along. Within the product, a user is always teased with the functionalities of the higher plans; and soon they grow into it.
Summary
So what is Typeform's moat? Large user-base, growth rate, integrations? Yes. But most of all constant innovation and being ahead of the curve in bringing the human element to virtual products.
What next?
Typeform recently launched VideoAsk, which is the next step in bringing the human personality back into online conversations. With the ongoing pandemic, people are getting more accustomed to video conversations. This space is growing at an unparalleled pace. The asynchronicity of VideoAsk combined with the human appeal, is a recipe for success. A few more features to assist in creating and editing a polished video snippet, should be added. It would enable their business users, engage with audience as well via websites, as they do via social media. Even email marketing can see a resurgence.
One of places, Typeform can improve their experience is feedback analysis. When I have a pile of responses to go through; I am looking for quick Sentiment analysis, trend and pattern detection, classification and quick categorisation. AI tools and techniques to accomplish this are aplenty. And even if the tool helps with half of the analysis, the time invested in processing through the data, goes down exponentially. The need for this would be much higher when processing through video responses. So as a productivity and life improvement feature, I am ready to invest in it.
Another scope for improvement is, what I call 'Closing the loop'. In a business, after we receive some feedback, we work on them, improve the experience and then want to measure the impact again with a similar questionnaire. I have to consolidate, combine the results, measure and showcase the impact across a sequence of such forms. But to do it well I have to do it, outside of the product. Let's complete the job to be done here, shall we?
Long read, but still this is just a tiny part of the story. Please share, if you know of some interesting facts about the company.
If you are from Typeform and reading this, first of all, my apologies for any incorrect information / analysis. This is just an outsider / user’s perspective. I would really appreciate any feedback.
Thanks for reading.