Chad Stephens
Chad Stephens - you can't make money from a form
A car loan for no car, a $5 save button, and two exits built on forms.
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Chad Stephens
Chad Stephens is a Melbourne Founder and angel investor. He co-founded 1Form with Chris Koch in 2006, which REA Group acquired in 2014, and then Fillr, which Rakuten acquired in 2020. He has made around 120 startup investments and is now building Formlytics, a data capture platform that uses links and QR codes.
Chad Stephens grew up in Bayside, walked out of two university degrees and was running a cafe in Brighton when he and his housemate Chris Koch started building ideas after hours. A venue search engine came first and didn't work. Then four of them tried to rent a house in Brighton, filled out the same paper application over and over, and that became 1Form.
Chad talks through funding it with maxed-out credit cards, a bank loan for a car they never bought and the sale of the cars they already had, then moving back home. He explains how they won over the property managers who shaped the product, the $5 button that finally made money, and a sale to REA Group that dropped from $17 million to $15 million a week before signing.
He also covers Fillr, which burned $300,000 a month, pivoted to mobile checkout for buy now, pay later apps, and sold to Rakuten after COVID derailed a Series B in March 2020. He finishes with three life lessons and a look at his next venture, Formlytics.