Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Format.com was a bootstrapped SaaS company that was acquired by Zenfolio in 2021. Prior to the acquisition, it had 50 employees and over 45 thousand customers. Its core product, Format Portfolio, enables photographers and artists to showcase their work through online web portfolios. It boasts professionally designed, beautiful templates, robust design options and easy to use interface. The company relied purely on product-led growth, as it it did not have a sales team.
After nearly 10 years of steady gains, customer growth started to level off as the company faced stiff competition from well-funded competitors like SquareSpace. As a result, customer acquisition costs went up and the company struggled to continue to grow revenue by purely relying on customer growth.