PDF Filler

PDF Filler began in 2008 as a lifestyle business started by Vadim. It ran with one other person until the end of 2011, when Boris Chaknovich, a former bioinformatics PhD and professor, joined as co-founder. In the interview, Boris said the product was "so needed and so good, it grew organically" even before the company accelerated after 2011. The founding year was a rough time to launch, but the product's usefulness carried it through.

The product is a document management platform that lets users build fillable forms online, such as a patient intake form for a dental office, and collect them from customers on mobile devices. It also supports document signing. Pricing is subscription-based, with three tiers (professional, personal and business) and the business tier at $15 per month. Boris said the average customer pays about $10 per month.

After joining, the team built what Boris called one of the most sophisticated digital marketing platforms. It runs about 60 million keywords across SEO and SEM, with tens of millions of landing pages that bring about 4 million monthly visitors. Keyword generation, bid management and ad creation are automated, and an internal A/B testing system personalizes the site experience.

The company did not describe a specific first-customer channel. Its growth came through the organic, search-driven engine and a partnership program. Boris said the team uses semantic search to find sites with interests similar to PDF Filler's, then has people contact those owners to earn backlinks. Referring domains and backlinks rose sharply between September and November, which Boris attributed to Google catching up with a year of work.

The unit economics were a standout. Boris said the company makes money on the first payment, spending less than $10 to acquire a customer. The host estimated a lifetime value of about $200 based on roughly 5% weighted gross churn. Churn is higher on the transactional side (around 9%) and lower in the enterprise and API segments, which Boris said is the company's prosumer mix.

PDF Filler has close to 200,000 customers and about 150 to 160 employees split between Boston (management) and Kiev (development, design and marketing). It has no salespeople, relying on no-touch sales. Boris said first-year revenue was about $20,000, 2015 revenue was in the double-digit millions, and the business is about $2 million in monthly recurring revenue. The company was bootstrapped, is working on a partnership with Salesforce, and is pursuing acquisitions of smaller, fragmented competitors in mail merge, CRM and signature.