Build forms anywhere, anytime with JotForm
Founded in 2006, JotForm introduced the idea of building a web form on a WYSIWYG form editor using JavaScript drag and drop and AJAX. Whether you’re looking to generate leads, collect order payments, conduct customer surveys, find applicants for a job, or register guests for an event, JotForm’s easy-to-use form builder lets you build a customized online form to fit your exact needs in minutes.
They offer around 9000 thousand templates to help you get your form up and running in a flash. With more than 50+ integrations they make it easy to connect with other applications from setting up an order form, to updating your CRM and help move your data to where you need it. Today, JotForm has 2 million users from over 177 countries, hosts more than 8 million forms and more than 200 million forms submitted.
Today they are launching JotForm 4.0 which lets you create, edit and publish online forms from any smartphone or tablet.
Kevin William David sat down with Aytekin Tank, CEO of JotForm to learn more.
Can you tell us about what you are working on ? What is JotForm?
Aytekin: JotForm makes it easy to create beautiful forms, measure how your forms are performing with form analytics, and integrate with payment and business tools your company uses. JotForm allows you to create forms and collect their forms, all without needing to code.
Founded in 2006 as the first WYSIWYG form builder, JotForm has been innovating in the online forms space ever since. JotForm offers the most advanced form designer available, and has 50+ integrations with partners including PayPal, Dropbox, Salesforce, Microsoft Excel, Square, and more.
Why are you building this? What problem are you trying to solve?
Aytekin: The problem that we’re trying to solve is that every company, from small business to enterprise needs online forms. Having developers take on the task of building forms (payment forms, lead generation forms, application forms, etc.) is expensive, time-consuming and an annoying task to boot. Why spend hours coding forms when you can drag-and-drop your way to a fully functional and professional looking form in minutes?
On a micro scale, we’re also trying to solve the many issues that arise when building forms.We built a revamped and more powerful version of JotForm to make it even easier for anybody to create online forms. Collaboration and continuous save make it easy to work together with co-workers on the same forms.
How is JotForm different from what’s already exists in the market? What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use JotForm?
Aytekin: JotForm was a pioneer in online form building. As our product has evolved, we’ve focused on making it easy to use. Our newest update, JotForm 4.0, was rebuilt from the ground up, and our focus was to make it 100 percent mobile friendly. We wanted our customers to have the same great experience building forms on their phones and tablets as they do on their computers. No other company offers this same capability.
We think companies should use JotForm for several reasons. First, it’s easy to use, so training costs are low to non-existent. People can start using it and create forms from scratch in a few minutes. Second, you don’t need to know how to code to create forms. Our interface is drag-and-drop, which makes it easy to build and edit a form. Third, companies can build a basic contact form or a sophisticated survey, employment application, or ecommerce solution using our tools. People are only limited by their creativity. Fourth, we have built-in collaboration tools, which means a company can have people in different locations working on the same form, and any changes are instantly saved. There’s no confusion as to which version is the most up-to-date.
Our top competitor is Google Forms. It is a simple and good product and it is completely free. Being free is great but if you have business your time should be more important than paying $20/month for a really good product. JotForm has many integrations and features. With JotForm you can create payment forms for products, subscription, donations and custom amounts. You can use Conditional Logic to make your forms work the way they should. You can customize the emails and forms the way they should be. We have just elevated the playing field to another level with the release of JotForm 4.0
Who uses JotForm? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using JotForm? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies (Sales, Marketing, Devops, etc.)?
Aytekin: JotForm is an extremely horizontal product. Just like spreadsheets or word processors, forms are used by pretty much everyone. At one end we have Facebook Marketing Team using JotForm for their campaigns, on the other end we have 1-person photography studios using JotForm to get custom orders. It is impossible to put it in a box. So, we don’t try to. We try to serve all segment which is really hard. But, we love the challenge.
How are your customers using JotForm? Could you share a few different use cases?
Aytekin: Depending on the needs of the company, some use JotForm as a customer-forward solution to receive feedback. Others have built ecommerce sites and accepted payments directly within their forms, or they’ve built a human resources application website using JotForm.
Have there been unique use cases for JotForm that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
Aytekin: We have so many different types of customers and many pleasantly surprise us with how they’re using JotForm.
Beast Metals, a Sacramento-based company that makes heavy-duty workout equipment uses JotForm as an order intake. Prior to using us, customers would email the company with an order that usually included several additional questions. This led to several rounds of back-and-forth email exchanges, and sometimes the customers would stop responding, or provide incomplete answers. Growing tired of this, the company discovered JotForm and created a customized order form. Not only could their customers spec out exactly what they wanted, a deposit and/or full payment could be accepted with the order. This led to fewer frustrated customers and growing sales.
We even created a short video about their experience with JotForm.
Who are some early/key customers?
Aytekin: JotForm has an impressive list of customers, including Uber, Delta Airlines, Harvard University, Facebook, the BBC and Disney. We also have a number of world-class musicians, such as Clint Black. When we review our list of customers, it’s always exciting to see the large number of top companies that use JotForm. Many key customers for us work at agencies, and they set up their clients with JotForm accounts.
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
Aytekin: The first years were all about making a great product. The biggest growth hack is to have a great product. If your product sucks growth hacks won’t help you. So, we worked on making a great product. A lot of it is about doing usability tests, reading user feedbacks and surveying users. We used our own product, JotForm, to continuously survey our users.
The biggest contributor for our success has been about being a free product. Free products are not only about being $0.00. It is also about having less steps to get users to start using your product. That’s why we have always made sure that we have a good free product. Freemium model really works for us because every user spreads JotForm just by sending form URLs to other people.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
Aytekin: Our last major update, JotForm 3.0, was six years ago. We spent a year working on this product behind closed doors. And one day we flipped the switch to the new product. Let me tell you, customers were not happy. Change is difficult, but we sprung the update on our customers with no prior warning. Plus, it was buggy because we didn’t have a lot of customers using a beta version.
To fix the problems aroused during that failed launch, we worked days and nights for three months, including weekends. The major lesson we learned was to never make the same mistake again. Now we continuously test and refine as we build new features. We also perform hundreds of usability tests to ensure that we get it right.
We’ve never stopped thinking about ways to make JotForm better since it was founded. But, because we burned ourselves once with a failed rewrite, we were afraid to redesign our product. But, we had to find a way to do it because our product was starting to show its age. It started to look dated. Rewrites are hard. Especially products like JotForm with so many features and millions of users. So we came up with a solution. If we can’t rewrite our product as a solution, we found a way to rewrite piece by piece, and release each piece at a time to our users.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
Aytekin: JotForm has more than 400 widgets and apps that help integrate forms with popular services, such as Salesforce. To incorporate a widget or an app, a customer can simply drag and drop it onto the form, provide account information and now JotForm is integrated with the user’s service. This makes it easy for our users to customize and connect JotForm to their existing business systems.
In fact, payments are one of our most popular integrations. By simply dragging and dropping a payment processor onto a form, our users can start accepting payments online. Right now we’re processing more than 10 million PayPal payments each month!
What are top 5–10 products that you depend to run the company & how do you use them?
Aytekin: Google Docs — We use the Google product suite to help with document creation and management. Since we have a number of remote employees, it’s been a great tool for us.
Slack — We needed an effective internal communication tool that would allow us to communicate on both one-on-one and groups. We’ve found Slack to be far more effective than relying on just email.
Trello — We have a number of projects in development at the same time across many departments, along with remote employees. We needed a system to help manage projects effectively and efficiently. It’s a great way to keep everyone informed about a project’s status.
Google Analytics — We’re a SaaS company, so we’re constantly measuring the performance of our website, our marketing campaigns and other vital statistics. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool that gives us great metrics.
FullStory — This is an amazing tool for both developers, customer support teams and marketing teams. You can basically watch your customers use your product like watching TV. It helps us understand our users and solve their problems.
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