Welcome to this episode of Hard Mode featuring Paperform Co-Founders Diony & Dean McPherson.

Paperform is a flexible online form builder like no others. It combines beautiful design with serious digital smarts to create endless possibilities - you’ll hear the company referred to as a digital Swiss Army knife more than once in this episode.

Payments, bookings, onboarding - all is possible in the Paperform experience, which is used by thousands of customers all around the world.

Diony and Dean talk to us about running the business while running a family together, why optionality is important, building a great team culture for what’s important and getting very good at arguing well. We discuss their journey as a bootstrapped company, venturing into new enterprise offerings and how they feel about the term 'lifestyle business' particularly as it relates to the balance between the company and family.

Talking points:

• The origins of the big vision
• How do we feel about the perception of a lifestyle business?
• Building a great culture with family and community first
• To scale or not to hyper scale?
• A customer base predominantly overseas.
• Between optionality and end-games
• Hard mode moments in the journey
• Getting good at arguing well
• Making sure that responsibility and authority are matched
• A background in arts/culture to a career in SaaS
• A-ha moment of where Paperform sits in the market
• Utmost emphasis on customer success
• Turn on the tap with enterprise product offerings

Links:

• Paperform
• 37Signals
• ANU
• Basecamp
• Google Arts & Culture
• Macquarie University
• Linktree
• Zapier

Online:

https://paperform.co/

Twitter: @PaperformCo

www.tractorventures.com

Follow Tractor Ventures on Twitter: @tractorventures

This episode was hosted by Matt Allen: @mattallen