Typeform was viral from day one. The product spread without anyone in the building doing much to make it happen. People used it, loved it, shared it. Growth just... arrived. If you've never been inside a company like that, it's hard to describe how intoxicating it is. Every metric is up. Every board meeting is a celebration. You start to believe that the thing you're doing must be right, because look at the numbers.
I was CFO. First time in the role. The founders were first-time founders running a co-CEO structure. The leadership team was young and inexperienced (myself included). None of that felt like a problem, because the growth made everything look like it was working.
Culturally, we aimed for high autonomy. Hire amazing people, trust them, get out of the way. In theory, this is exactly right. In practice, we had autonomy without a clear strategy to anchor it to. Lots of freedom, very few guardrails. People were making smart, local decisions that didn't add up to a coherent direction. But the growth kept coming, so nobody felt the urgency to fix it.
The first crack appeared in the retention data. The data team did genuinely excellent cohort work and discovered that our "users" were actually three completely different groups. There were people who paid for a month and churned, essentially using us as a paid trial. There were periodic users, like a teacher surveying pupils at the end of term, who'd pay for a month here and there throughout the year. And then there were the ones with ongoing use cases (marketers running lead gen forms on their websites) who paid every month and stuck around.
The viral engine was brilliant at generating the first type and much less brilliant at generating the third. The growth numbers looked spectacular. The underlying economics told a different story.
Meanwhile, hundreds of enterprise users were already inside the product. Nike. Uber. Governments. They'd found us through the same viral loop as everyone else, but they had real, ongoing, high-value use cases. They were the third cohort at scale. And nobody was picking up the phone.
This is the part I still think about. "Sales" was considered a naughty word. Not in a vague, unstated way. It was an open discussion. The concern was that building a sales team would damage the culture. So investment stayed small, deliberately, to keep the perceived risk low. We had the signal sitting right in front of us, enterprise users already using the product, already loving it, and we chose to protect the culture over acting on it.
The retention cohort data didn't immediately shift behaviour either. I think this comes back to being an inexperienced leadership team. I was a first-time CFO. I didn't push it hard enough. Nobody did. When growth is strong and the culture feels good, it takes real conviction to stand up and say "this isn't working." We didn't have that conviction yet. We hadn't earned it the hard way.
At the time Typeform beleived that culture and commercial ambition were in tension. That you had to find the right balance. I don't believe that anymore. I have enough experience now to know that you can build any company and any function with the culture you want. It's not an either/or situation. It requires focus and effort, but it's worth it if you truly want global impact. The Typeform version of me thought protecting the culture meant avoiding the uncomfortable commercial stuff. The version of me building now knows that a great culture is one that can absorb hard decisions, not one that avoids them.
Virality gave us everything and hid everything. The growth, the enthusiasm, the feeling that we were building something special... all real. But underneath it, the retention economics were fragile, the strategy was diffuse, and the biggest commercial opportunity we had was going unanswered because we were afraid of what a sales team might do to the vibe. We had the data. We had the users. We just didn't have the experience to act on what was right in front of us.