[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform

Aytekin Tank is the Founder and CEO of Jotform, an online form-builder company that empowers users to easily create custom online forms. Under his leadership, Jotform has grown into a global SaaS powerhouse with over 25 million users. In addition to his business expertise, Aytekin is a bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork, a book that offers insights into productivity and automation strategies. He advocates for no-code solutions, enabling anyone to create functional forms and workflows.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:54] How Jotform makes form creation effortless for anyone 
• [08:33] The importance of integrations and partnerships in the growth of Jotform
• [11:26] How user feedback impacts Jotform’s product development
• [17:24] The strategic advantage of offering a free tier for a SaaS product
• [23:33] Techniques Aytekin Tank used to achieve 15,000 users in the early days of Jotform
• [27:21] How to remain competitive when big players enter your market
• [33:01] How automation can help you scale your business and reduce busywork
• [36:33] The value of having mentors
• [45:26] The distinction between being a founder and a CEO
• [52:50] How Jotform maintains a productive culture with hundreds of employees
• [57:33] Jotform’s customer success stories

In this episode…

In today’s fast-paced world of technology, streamlining processes is not a choice, but a necessity. Have you ever felt overwhelmed with mundane tasks, leaving little room for creativity and growth? How do successful entrepreneurs maintain focus on innovation while juggling day-to-day operational tasks?

Aytekin Tank, a SaaS expert, reveals his strategy for scaling his business while remaining bootstrapped. He takes us through the evolution of Jotform’s user-centric philosophy and how it shaped the simplicity and power of its online form builder. Aytekin dives into the significance of a freemium model, the intricacies of balancing the roles of founder and CEO, and why listening to user feedback is a game-changer for product development.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of Jotform, about leveraging automation to enhance business efficiency. Aytekin discusses how Jotform makes form creation effortless for anyone, how user feedback impacts product development, the strategic advantage of offering a free tier for a SaaS product, and how Jotform maintains a productive culture with hundreds of employees.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Aytekin Tank on LinkedIn | Website
• Jotform
• Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff by Aytekin Tank

Special Mention(s):

• Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
• Built: The Hidden Stories Behind our Structures by Roma Agrawal

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Impact of Automation and Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer Founder of AWeber” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments: 

• “Our business is actually automation: helping people streamline their work, helping people accomplish more, be much more productive, save time, save energy.”
• “Free is a great way to meet people, get their trust, and get them to try the product.”
• “I thought I was in the forms business, but our business is actually automation.”
• “Automate, delegate, or eliminate those things first, so you can do less, achieve more, and save your brain for the big stuff.”
• “Being a founder is about reinventing the future of your company, your product, your team.”

Action Steps: 

1. Embrace automation and delegation: By automating repetitive tasks and delegating them to others, you can free up valuable time to focus on high-impact activities. 
2. Conduct regular time audits: This practice enables you to eliminate or streamline tasks that don’t contribute to your core objectives.
3. Leverage free resources and support: This allows you to experiment and find solutions that enhance your technological literacy or operational efficiency.
4. Focus on customer feedback and user research: Address the opportunity to better meet customer needs, product development, and improve user satisfaction.
5. Cultivate strategic partnerships and integrations: This can open up new opportunities and streamline workflows.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:23 

Dr, Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Aytekin Tank of Jotform. Every time I talk to someone about Jotform, everyone’s heard of it, Aytekin. And so, at least in certain circles, you’re a household name. Before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since this is part of the top SaaS series, I had one of the co-founders of Zapier, Wade Foster, I know you know Wade, and you guys have some good content out there. There’s a panel of you guys talking, which is a good episode, and they’ve grown. He talked about growing to millions of users, which is pretty amazing. Pipedrive, one of the co-founders of Pipedrive, on when I talked to him, I took and they were around 10,000 customers. Now I think they’re over 100,000 customers. And talked about growing as well.

That was kind of a crazy journey. Talked about moving from Estonia, getting married and also discovering a brain tumor, all within the same year, which was kind of crazy journey. The founder of AWeber was also a really interesting one that and many more on inspiredinspired.com. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships, partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and also the full execution. So we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host and the company so they can create amazing relationships, create amazing content, and, most importantly, run their business.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should Jotform actually has a podcast. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I am excited to introduce Aytekin Tank. He’s the founder of Jotform. Jotform, which is surprisingly a bootstrapped global SaaS company that provides powerful online forms to 25-plus million users. He’s also the best-selling author of Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain For the Big Stuff. Aytekin Tank, thanks for joining me.

Aytekin Tank 3:05 

Thank you, Jeremy, for having me on the show. And yeah, all and this sales companies you mentioned, we actually have integration with all of them, so they are actually very famous companies. So I’m definitely going to check out those episodes.

Jeremy Weisz 3:18 

Talk about the important, we’ll get into Jotform. And by the way, there’s a video version, so I am going to share my screen here, but talk about the importance of integrations and partnerships. And I’m going to pull up, we’re at Jotform right here. And you know, if you don’t know what it is, it helps you create a powerful form. So actually my wife uses it in her business, her psychology, business coping partners. One of the big attractions is there’s HIPAA compliance to the forms. But talk about partnerships for a second and integrations.

Aytekin Tank 3:54 

Yeah, I mean, so our business is about forms, and basically it’s a SaaS service product where you go and use one of the, you could use one of the templates, or you could just create a form from scratch. And whenever you need to do something, like when you need to get people to sign up for something, register for something like when you need to survey them, or get them to apply for something like when you need to collect leads and all kinds of stuff that you can just go ahead and create it yourself, and it’s a very easy to use. And I actually created Jotform 18 years ago. It’s been a while and we have always had this idea that it should be so easy to use that anybody could use it. And that’s why we, over the years, we kept improving it and making it easier to use.

And so the idea is that it’s a no-code product. So even if you don’t know how to code, how to program, you can actually go to Jotform and create a form, right? And in many instances, just creating a form is not enough, like you actually need that data that you receive from your customers, clients, clients on other platforms. And so we actually have integration with hundreds of other products, and so that you can actually pass that data to others. But we also have our own products so that you can actually use it internally, like we have products, like we have this document generation product where you can actually create PDF files from your form data. If you need to, like, more durable, shareable version, we have a protocol Jotform Sign where you can actually do e-signatures with people.

For example, just reuse the data so they invite them to sign a document. We have, like, workflow approval features you can actually, if you have multiple forms, you can actually turn them into apps using Jotform apps so that, you know, you can create a mobile app where people can actually access the forms easily, like, if you have like a community, if you have like clients that needs to access to your forms. That’s an easy place for them to find these forms, as opposed to, like, just trying to find them in emails and everywhere else. But yeah, definitely the integrations are really important, being able to send the data to other platforms, and in some cases, like receive data from other platforms so that you can pre-populate your forms. It’s an important thing. And a lot of Jotform users use that so that they can actually use it together with other products. And the reason, even if they use another product, like a CRM or something else, the reason they use Jotform and then pass the data to the other products is because Jotform is actually like a really good forms product.

It has, like, so many features, so many advanced features, like kind of like condition logic, you can make your forms much more smart and efficient and easy to use. And because of that, many people will, some of these products actually have form like, you were just showing like, MailChimp, right? You can actually with MailChimp, you can actually create, create a form as well, but like, it’s not as flexible as Jotform. So you could just create a form with Jotform and then pass that information to MailChimp or like Google Drive, Google Sheets, wherever you use like, you can actually pass the data to as many places as you want and be able to kind of automate your work. Be able to, like, automate your workflows, so that you can actually accomplish more by just like, streamlining your workflows?

Jeremy Weisz 8:02 

Yeah, you could see here when we’re looking at the integrations page, and obviously there’s a lot of CRMs here, so that people can get the data in the MailChimp. And we talked about Pipedrive earlier. Pipedrive’s on here. Salesforce is on here. Keep is on here, and a bunch of others. Is this a hard decision from a company standpoint, to create these integrations, because it is development time and it is time for the company. How do you decide, yeah, we’re going to build and work on integration for this particular software?

Aytekin Tank 8:33 

When I started Jotform, I thought that I was in the forms business, so we created all kinds of form features, but as the time went along and when I started actually helping our customers, our users, I discovered that our business is actually automation. It’s actually helping people streamline their work, helping people accomplish more, be much more productive, save time, save energy, so that automation can help them get stuff done, and so that they can focus on more important things. And so, in addition to the forms, we started, kind of focusing on the next step, like when we actually kind of interview our users, when we actually talk to our users on support, or just doing like interviews, we discovered that they’re actually like, there is actually a journey, and the journey starts with a form but there’s just, like, so many steps in it, and they are accomplishing many things.

And if we can actually help them accomplish not just the first step, but also the next steps in this journey, actually we are helping them accomplish more, make it much more easier, streamline, prevent mistakes, doing things manually. So we started like, kind of implementing all these features and products and adding different sub-products to our product so that they can actually do those things. Like, some of the things we did was, like the document generation, like you can create, generate PDFs, Jotform apps is like this, no code product where you can actually add your forms, create a mobile app Jotform sign is like Esignature product.

And so integrations are the same way when people actually need to complete their task on some other platform, we make it very easy for them to pass the data, and we are also integrating with these integration platforms like Zapier and make but we also like try to build our own native integrations, because this gives us more opportunities to like, make things easier for our users, because we are able to like, add more features to it, like more options to it, as opposed to just using these integration products, but they are great. Like, I love Zapier and it’s a great way for people to, like, connect all these different sales products together to accomplish things.

Jeremy Weisz 11:26 

I think, how do you decide on what feature requests to execute on? Because at this point, I mean, you have millions of users, probably people like, I wish it would do this. I wish it would do that. You’d go crazy trying to follow everyone’s but over time, obviously, you’ve built a lot of, like, a lot of features out. What’s the decision-making process look like yes, we’re going to move forward with this feature request. I don’t know if there’s an example you have from like, early on, where you actually got a request and maybe decided to do it or not do it. What’s the decision-making look like?

Aytekin Tank 11:27 

Yeah, when I released Jotform, I don’t think we had the emails and that’s like it was very quickly people wanted to, like, receive their submissions by email, and then it turned out that most people actually use Jotform with email. Their user interfaces email like they just go to Jotform, create a form, and then they receive their data by email. And they don’t ever come back to Jotform.com to actually use all the tools and data tools or anything, just email is good enough for them. They want to just instantly receive the data by email.

Jeremy Weisz 12:41 

They log in, they create the form, and they get an actual email with the form. They literally never have to look at the Jotform ever again. But they’re still using it.

Aytekin Tank 12:53 

Definitely. So I think when we receive feature requests, I think it’s very important for us to always have these feedback buttons. And we also use our own product to create. In Jotform, if you have a website, you can create a feedback button and you can put it on your website. But we also use our own product here as well. And just whenever we add a new feature, we will just put this feedback button, and then we’ll just receive a lot of feedback about that feature product, and then we will improve it with this feedback. And also we provide free support to everyone. Like, just usually, like, support is not available in many products to free users, but in our case, like even if you are a free user, and most of our users are actually free users, you get support. And we have an average one-hour turnaround time on our support.

Even if you are free, you get that and when people actually use the product and when they have, like, support questions, when they see that we have this, we have people with their problems, they will also use the same place to, like, send lots of feature requests, and then what happens is that our product managers will just add them up and just see, like, okay, this is the top requested feature, but this gives us, like this minor improvement opportunities, right? To find those, like, big improvement opportunities in your product, I think what you need to do is you need to kind of talk to people, and what we do is like we have this user research team, and what they do is like they talk to our customer a whole day, like, just constantly talking to our users. And what we do here is like, we’ll just especially like, if you want to get feedback about a specific product, we will just find people who are already using those products, and then we just send them an email saying, we want to take like, 45 minutes of your time, and as an appreciation, we are going to also send you this Amazon gift card. And can we schedule a meeting? And just the conversion rate is so high in that email that, just like, I think it’s like 40% or something like that, very high.

I mean, we are targeting people who are really using it and so people don’t even want super users. People are actually really happy to be able to kind of tell us, like, what they need. So, they’re not even doing it for the gift card, but it’s awesome, nice edition. And from those interviews, those interviews, they don’t just watch those interviews. They also kind of present it to us and from those interview in those interviews, we don’t just ask them, like, how they use Jotform, but what else they do? Like, you know, how? Like, there’s this big system, they actually have this big workflow, and Jotform is just one step in this journey, and what does they do? Like, how else we can help them? And usually, the big ideas, the big opportunities, come out because we look at those, we ask those questions about, what else you do? Like, what do you do after this? Like, what do you do after you get the data from Jotform, and those answers help us come up with new products and opportunities.

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