Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Itaken Tank, the founder and CEO of JotForm and and author of the new book Automate youe Busy Work, Do Less, Achieve More and Save youe Brain for the Big Stuff.
Itayken has almost two decades of experience in the SaaS industry and JotForm has helped millions of users worldwide eliminate paperwork and automate their workflows.
In this interview I take in shares his personal journey as a SaaS founder and how he discovered the power of automation to scale his business.
He explains his automation flywheel and and how it can help SaaS founders and their teams reclaim their time, increase their productivity.
And he shares some practical tips and strategies for getting started with automation.
We'll deep dive into the six steps of the automation flywheel and explore some real world examples of how Itech and his team have used automation to simplify their workflows and free up their time.
So if you're tired of being bogged down by manual work and and repetitive tasks, this episode is for you.
Itaken's tips and strategies will help you automate your workflows and hopefully help you take your SaaS business to the next level.
I hope you enjoy Itakin welcome to the show.
Aytekin Tank (01:37.360)
Welcome back.
Being back at the show is great.
It's been five years.
Omer (01:42.720)
Yeah, yeah, we were just talking about that.
It's like amazing how time flies.
So it was episode 186 where we talked about the founding of Jotform and how you were working as a developer getting bored by creating manually all these forms that you were building on the job.
And I was looking through some of the notes and then you'd said hey, if I ever run a business, if I ever quit my job I should go and build some kind of form building software.
And we took the story through to 2018 when I think you had about 4 million users already.
Multiple seven figure business in terms of ARR, where have you got to now?
How's the business doing?
What's the size of the business today?
Aytekin Tank (02:32.880)
It's going great.
We have grown to 500 employees now.
We have offices in seven cities all around the world and now we have like 20 million users at Chatform.
So we are doing great and we continue to grow at around 50% revenue
Omer (02:55.850)
growth rate wow, that is worlds apart from where you were when you came up with the idea and built the first version of that product.
So congratulations on.
Aytekin Tank (03:08.930)
It's been 17 years.
It's been a long time.
Omer (03:12.290)
Yeah, that's true.
Aytekin Tank (03:13.650)
Yeah.
Omer (03:14.770)
So today we're going to talk about your new book which is called Automate your busy work, do less, achieve more and save your brain for the big stuff.
And you know, you and I were talking and we thought it would be a great idea.
You're a founder.
This show is mostly people you know in the SaaS space, early stage founders.
And so what could we do to help them to take advantage of some of the things that you've been able to do in terms of the way you run your business?
And this book basically has a bunch of great ideas in terms of how people can use automation, no code tools to unlock productivity, get rid of a lot of the repetitive tasks that many of us have to do day in, day out so we can focus more on the important things.
So before we get into that, what inspired you to write this book?
Aytekin Tank (04:13.540)
So, as you remember this original stir for Jotform, I was working for a company as a developer in New York and I really loved my job.
But there was one test that I really hated and that was creating online forums.
And we had like hundred websites and I had to like create so many forms and I wanted to automate, find a way to automate creation of these forms.
That's actually how I started Jotform.
I couldn't find a way to automate the forms so I said, okay, I'm going to do a product that automates the form.
But once I started Jotform, I found out that people actually needed more things.
Like the forms are just the beginning of the journey.
There is this whole business process right after creation of the forms.
They need a lot of other things.
Like people fill out forms so that they can register for stuff, they can apply for things, request things.
Like it's just the first step in a journey and I wanted to help them out in all the way on the journey.
So we added features like automating document creation, like PDF generation, like they are able to create custom emails.
Like we have an airtable, like, you know, product like a spreadsheet product where they can actually do lots of different things with their data and we have reporting and we have so many custom features like Jotform Sign.
But in the early days I was helping all these people with the automation of their business.
I was helping them automate their business processes.
But I was struggling myself.
Like, I was spending all my day answering emails, like, supporting customers.
We weren't very big.
We had like three to five employees.
But still it was taking me time to manage them because before I started my company, I never managed anyone.
So I was just learning this management stuff as well.
And I was doing all the things, like accounting, hr, ordering snacks for the office.
So it was just too much.
And I was like, overwhelmed.
I was over my head.
And it was, you know, it wasn't easy.
And then one day a friend of mine sent me an email and he said, hey, did you see that Google actually came up with a competitive product now you.
You're competing with Google.
And I was like, I was shocked.
Like, okay, now I'm already spending all this time, like just trying to, you know, all the operations of the business and I have no time to actually think about anything else, like really grow the product, really improve the quality of the product and, you know, come up with new feature ideas, things like that.
And now I was competing with Google, so it was really bad news.
And I was like, really shocked about it.
And, you know, I started thinking about it.
Okay, I thought that I'm helping all these people automating their businesses, but I'm doing everything manually.
Like, there is something wrong with this.
I wasn't even using our own product, you know, forms for many of the things I could use for.
And I thought, okay, why don't I apply my own medicine to my own business?
Why don't I start automating things?
And that just started things.
And I first started with my emails supporting customers, product development and accounting, hr.
I started automating as much as possible.
And this allowed me to actually be able to spend more of my time on my business as opposed to in my business.
This is like business 101.
But I was making this mistake in the first years and it worked.
And we have grown to this much larger company now and Google didn't beat us.
And we are really big now and we have 500 employees and people love our product and we continue to grow our product to new features and new ideas.
And this worked out really well.
So I thought, I've been able to do this and I've been able to actually teach my company, teach my employees to also automate as much as possible.
Like we have this.
Really try to do everything with automation.
Why don't I also.
And I have also been applying these automation principles to my own product as well.
In the product, we automate as much as Possible help people automate things.
So I thought, why don't I actually provide this information to the world?
Why don't I share this?
I developed this framework, framework that I call the Automation Flywheel.
Why don't I share it with the world?
And I have, I have a blog I write on like Fast Company Entrepreneur, Medium and Jotform Blog.
But this wasn't something I could just do with a blog post.
This was, this was long, but I didn't expect it to be this big.
Like it took me more than a year, but it turned out really well.
I really was able to write a great book and I'm very proud of it and it's going to come out on May 16th.
That's the story of my book.
Omer (09:37.570)
Yeah, that's great, that's great.
You know, I think back then when you were doing a lot of this automation, I mean, you're a developer, you can code.
Automation becomes easier if you can spin up like a Python script to do something great.
But for the majority of people who can't code, it's always been a difficult thing to do.
And recently with, with the prevalence of so many no code tools around now, it's becoming more and more easier and accessible for anybody to start automating so much of what they do.
So we're going to dig into that and we're going to, we're going to talk about some real world examples of how you've used it and how you're using it in the company, but just give us an overview of the book.
Like what are the main themes in the book?
And then you mentioned the automation flywheel.
What I'd like to do is, is to dig into what exactly that flywheel is.
We'll talk about the specific, you know, the six steps of that flywheel and then we'll put it into practice.
But maybe just start with like, what are the main themes in the book?
Aytekin Tank (10:39.070)
So I mean, one of the reasons the book was really hard to write was because my publisher, Wiley, really wanted me to write a book for everyone, but not just for like developers then.
And every time I tried to write about those kind of like Python stuff that, you know, that's no, like, you know, this has to be, this has to be available to everyone.
Anybody who gets this book should understand and be able to apply the ideas.
And I put like so much examples and case studies in this book.
But all these examples and case studies and, you know, tools are, I think temporary because it's just like the, the amount of change is like Incredible.
Like this, all these AI tools are coming out every day.
There are new SaaS products that are coming out.
So I mean those examples are great, but really it's about understanding the fundamentals of the automation.
So I start the book with that.
Like I try to explain the fundamentals of automation.
I talk about something I call Automation first mindset, where I talk about things like, you know, the importance of laziness will get said.
Like I would give a hard job to a lazy person because the lazy person would find a way to solve it.
You know, there are things like that.
You know, it's important to be impatient, it's important to be lazy.
So you don't, you don't put up with doing the same things again and again.
It's also important to have this systems thinking so that you look at things as systems.
Otherwise it's just everything is very, you know, can become confusing.
So system thinking is an important part of that Automation first mindset as well.
So I talk about automation first myself and I also talk about the framework that I developed, the automation Flywheel.
And that's a process of continuous improvement and it allows you to kind of start from zero.
You have no automations.
You are like me in 2008, completely over your head.
It's just so much busy work and where do you go?
The Automation Flyway framework actually takes you step by steps to build a system where you have most of your stuff automated and you can continuously improve that.
And once I talk about these fundamentals then I go into more examples.
Like I talk about how to automate your creativity, how to automate your growth and I give examples to these kinds of different ideas and rest of the book is a lot of examples, recipes.
But as I said, those examples are not going to be useful in five years.
But more important is to get the idea about the importance of the automation and how to apply in your business and the principles about how you apply those principles, those ideas.
Omer (13:56.570)
Yeah, that's great.
I think I'm a lazy person because I think one of the things that really frustrates me is when I have to do something twice and I know I'm going to have to do it a third time.
I know there's an opportunity to automate something, but being able to step away from the day to day work to think about it and to figure out a solution and implement a solution is where things fall apart and it's like, yeah, I'll do that one day.
So that's what I liked about the flywheel, that it Kind of just gives you a good framework just to think about, okay, when these things come up, or being a little bit more proactive in sort of the areas that you're spending your time, what you can start to do and actually follow through to implement some of these things.
So why don't we jump into that?
The flywheel, the six steps, and I think you kind of group them in pairs.
So the first two were like divide and conquer.
Second the three and four were like design and implement and then refine and iterate.
So let's talk through each one of those and if you can just explain to us what they mean, why you think this is an important part of the process, that would be great.
Maybe even we can kind of touch on some brief examples before we go into deep dive into some of the things that you're actually doing.
Aytekin Tank (15:23.280)
So the automation flywheel is a process of continuous improvement.
But it's not just like one thing you do once and it's not even like something you do for a while and then you stop.
It's a flywheel, it's a continuous process.
You have to continue doing that.
And it's just, you have to start somewhere and you keep doing that and you get dividends as you get more and more automations, but it helps you build systems.
So you start with nothing and then you have the systems and then you go from there and it keeps improving your productivity.
But with the automation flywheel, you kind of have to first decide what you should do and what you shouldn't be doing.
It's not about just automating everything.
I don't think it makes sense to automate everything.
I think it makes sense to look at what you are doing, prioritize what you are doing and things that you don't care about that you should be automating.
And the things that really helps you should, should stay not automated.
For example, you know, like things like, you know, growing yourself, like, you know, reading books or researching stuff.
You shouldn't be automating those things because it's just when you do those things, you are actually, you're not just doing something, you're actually learning more stuff.
But to get to the actual automation flywheel, it's a, it's a circle.
So it starts with divide and conquer.
And divide step is about looking at what you are doing and deciding what should be automated.
One of the techniques I describe in the book is something I call auditing your workday.
So basically you can put triggers every hour, and at the end of every hour you can just write down what you did during that hour and you do this for a week and a week is usually enough that you can find out how you are spending your time and you can decide, okay, hey, I shouldn't be spending my time with this kind of stuff and I should be spending my time with this kind of stuff.
I should be spending my time with coming up with great ideas for my product and but I shouldn't be spending my time with really, you know, answering these emails like those are waste of time for me.
Like, you know.
And so you first divide and then the concourse step is about basically you spot workflows from these work because the things you do are not just single things, they are not just single to do items.
When you look at what you do, you'll find out that you're actually spending your time with things that are like series of tasks and we call them workflows.
And workflows can involve multiple people.
So if HR related task is done, you have to, you know, speak with the person, speak with the HR department.
Like there are lots of step involved and it's not just happening in a single moment, it can take a long time.
So the concur step is about actually understanding the workflows involved.
The next step is design and implement.
And the design step you actually decide what you should be automating.
Like which parts of this, these workflows can be automated and which parts should be automated.
And in the implementation step and there are so many no code products, you research all the products and you find the products that really works for you for your case.
And in the book I describe how to pick products, how to use GT for reviews, how to make sure that they have updates and they have a long history and they are trustable.
So those kind of things and then you implement those automations in the next step, in the refine step, you create KPIs and you look at the numbers of your automations, how they are doing.
Because when you do things manually you can actually see if things break down or things are working out well.
But when you start automating you have to actually keep watch and you have to monitor what's going on.
And that requires keeping an eye on the KPIs and that requires you to kind of refine the automations you do.
And the final step, the sixth step is to iterate which is about if you are doing automations in one way, changing them, innovating your automations, updating them.
So it's basically all these automations you are Building turn into systems and these systems require kind of maintenance.
But the great thing is like you are actually spending most of your time with the stuff that you care about and only you're only monitoring them so that you are making sure that nothing is breaking down.
And the great thing about this, the flywheel is you don't actually have to even automate things.
Like even if you just use the flywheels first two steps, divide and conquer.
Even if you create workflow diagrams and if you document your work when you are doing that, it's a great exercise.
You can actually understand what you are spending your time on the divide step and in the conquer step you can actually understand create the workflows, document what you are doing and you can delegate stuff, even if you don't automate it, you can delegate it to someone else in your company.
So I think this is a great exercise.
But I think in the end you'll find that there are really good automation tools and there is just like there's this no code revolution, there's this SaaS revolution.
Like there's just thousands of great products out there and many people are not even aware of them and they are actually struggling and there is an automation tool that's available for them, but they are not even aware of it.
So the goal of this automation flywheel is to help people find their way so that they can build their automation and systems.
Omer (22:19.140)
Got it right.
So I think that's a good distinction that the first to divide and conquer.
It's like whether you're going to use automation, no code tools or not, that's a good process that everybody should go through to get better awareness of how they're spending their time, how things could be systematized, automated, whatever.
Aytekin Tank (22:40.460)
Right.
Omer (22:41.140)
And then the design and implement is when you're actually going and putting those things together into practice and then refine and iterate is about continue looking for, for improvements to do better and better with that.
How many like ballpark, like how many automations do you think you're using right now?
One of the things, I mean I've tried to do this and I do this in some areas, you know, using some no code tools or zapier and whatever.
But I've also found that things get out of control very easily in the sense that maybe I didn't document something and so something breaks down the line and I can't remember where I set it up or which tools I use.
I think it was zapier, but was it something else and what was triggering this?
And yes, you can go and look at the zap to see how you set that up.
But just to me that's the one thing is as you have more and more of these automations it just feels like there's a whole bunch of stuff that you could potentially break and you need to track.
So what does that look like for you and how do you stay sane with all of that going on around you?
Aytekin Tank (23:53.760)
There's no way to tell how many automations I have.
It's pretty high.
Even on Gmail I have like 3,000 filters.
Omer (24:06.000)
Wow.
Aytekin Tank (24:08.410)
So I mean but that I created that for over the years like probably in like 10 years.
So it's not something like I spend like ton of time in a single day.
So there's just a lot of automations.
But that's why actually the last step, refine an iterate is required so that all these systems are kind of being monitored so you are aware of what's going on and when things break down you are aware of that.
So you kind of have to have that mindset that when something breaks down you get notified about it and you have to catch those things and keep following them.
Omer (24:48.530)
Okay, you mentioned Gmail and filters and we're going to go into that.
So you and I talked about like, hey, let's pick out like three real world examples of how you're automating your busy work and in your company.
So, so it can help other people, other founders, you know, try and apply some of some of these lessons with, you know, with these examples.
And so we picked as a starting point was the automation of email with Gmail and filters because that's something, it's kind of like the first step to doing automation and anybody can start to do that fairly easily.
The second one we picked was how to how you're automating your product development in terms of continuous testing, deployment, bug tracking and so we're going to talk about that.
And then the third one is how you've automated your HR onboarding.
So those I think are three good scenarios that we can talk about.
Let's get started with the Gmail one first because I think that's the one that most people will understand fairly easily.
Aytekin Tank (25:42.970)
Yeah, as I mentioned like in the first day, even during the first days like I was receiving a lot of emails and I was struggling with this incoming number of emails and there are emails that are really important and there are emails that are not that important but you have to check them all.
So in the beginning I started with inbox zero Inbox Zero is really good because if you apply Inbox zero, you don't miss any emails.
Like you never, you know, have someone, you know saying, oh, you missed my email, you know, you never returned to me, or something like that.
It's great.
But at some point Inbox zero even starts not working because the amount of emails is increasing and then you're spending so much time like trying to clean them up.
So my second step was to actually build this automation solution using only Gmails like labels and filters.
That's it.
There's nothing else.
I mean, I actually looked at all the products available and I couldn't find one that really worked for me.
So after searching for so many solutions, okay, I decide, okay, hey, Gmail actually has a lot of these features.
So why don't I, I was on, our company is already using Gmail, so why don't I try to do this on Gmail?
And I was thinking if I can't get this done with labels and filters, I could use the, you know, Gmail app Science script.
But I never needed, I never needed to use that.
Just it was enough to use the labels and filters.
So here, here it works.
So the biggest problem for me was the, the amount of emails I receive and the priority of the emails.
And you know, it's just there's some important email that's, that's sitting there and then when I process the Inbox zero, I will start from the oldest email.
It will take me a long time and during I have like many meetings.
So between the meetings I will have too much time.
So, you know, these, these emails would wait multiple days.
So what I did was I created three labels, just three labels, Level one, level two and level three.
So level one is for the really high priority, urgent stuff.
And for example, if our VP of HR sends a direct email to me that goes to my level one, my publisher is Wiley.
If they send me an email, like if, if it's coming from the domain wiley.com it's going to go to my level one email inbox.
So it's only a few emails are coming through.
So to label one level one.
So this way it's not like becoming large, it's staying small.
And I'm always like updating my filters to make sure that if something important, if I'm waiting for an important email or something, it's going to go to L1.
So this worked great.
Even when I'm on vacation, I have like, let's say I have like half an hour every day to check my emails.
I will start with level one.
Let's say I have like 10 emails.
I will just process all those emails, clean up my level one, and you know, I'm not going to look even the other emails at all because they can wait.
So the level, level two is from emails from the people I know, like people I communicate with.
If they sent me a direct email, like someone sent me an email, and in the two fields, it's just written to me, that cost me my level two.
And level three is for all the other emails that I care about, like reports, like email threads, where I'm included, that I should probably be reading the thread, but it's okay if I read it a week later.
And like newsletters, things like that.
I mean, I still read these emails, but it take me a longer time.
Maybe I will process them.
You know, it will take me a week to read them, but that's okay.
And everything else, like all this marketing spam, everything else goes to my default, default inbox.
And I will clean that up time to time because, you know, one in a hundred, one in a thousand, there's going to be like an important email that didn't go to one of the filters.
So I'm going to create a filter for that.
That's why I have like 3,000 filters, because over time I created all these filters.
So basically by default, every email goes to my inbox and the important emails go to my priority inboxes that I created.
But here's the most important part.
I never go directly to my inbox.
What I have is I have bookmarks in my browser and I will just click on the bookmark that says, like L1, level one.
And then the first thing I do when I want to check my emails, I will go to that bookmark and go to L1 emails and I will process that.
And after I process that, I go to L2 or L3.
And so this way I'm prioritizing emails.
And even though I receive hundreds of emails every day, I'm keeping it safe.
So this saved me a lot of time.
And it also keeps me on top of important and urgent information.
Omer (31:09.330)
Does that work for you on mobile?
Because I think most mobile apps tend to default to the inbox.
Aytekin Tank (31:15.090)
Yeah, I mean, I have to search for L1, so it's not working as well as the desktop, but the bookmarks still work on mobile, if I'm using like an iPad or iPhone, like I could use Safari, but as you said, like Gmail, I couldn't find a way to own the Gmail.
App to directly go like, you know, select L1 Emails in Inbox.
Omer (31:36.960)
Great.
So I think that's, that's a great starting point.
And if, if, if someone's listening to this and they're not doing that, that's a great place that you could get started today, right?
Like even just looking through your inbox and seeing the kinds of things that you know are most important, but they're kind of almost you know, hidden because you've got so much other low priority stuff sitting in your inbox that you could start tackling.
Let's move on to the next one because now we're moving up a little bit and getting a little more complicated with, with automation.
And I think this one will be very relevant for people listening to this as well is how you automate product development and there's a lot of moving parts with, with you know, building a product.
Tell us specifically about, you know, what, what this automation is about.
Aytekin Tank (32:27.970)
This is actually used by many companies.
So this is not like unique to me or my company.
And it's continuous integration and deployment and it's, you know, very popular among companies that follow the lean development methods.
But in the beginning, the first years of Jotform, we didn't have that.
It would take us six months to release our products and it would be a big event and customers would revolt because we would have so many bugs and we would change so many things that they wouldn't like.
And so from moving from there to continued integration and deployment made a huge difference for us because now we are only releasing gradually, small changes and if something breaks, we are quickly aware of it and we can fix it quickly.
So we are using things like Jenkins.
So anytime a developer actually makes a commit and then it's getting reviewed by the, you know, there is pull request, it's getting reviewed but right after that it's going to be released on our app.
And we have, you know, we have all these automated testing that checks for everything like unit test and the, you know, all these other tests are being applied and it goes automatically and becomes live automatically.
And we also do the same for the enterprise as well.
Enterprise goes a little bit later.
The regular version actually becomes live pretty quickly.
And we had that since probably since like 2010.
So it's been a long time, more than a decade and it's been great.
And automating things as much as possible allowed our team to become really developed our product much more easily, much more.
You know, when a new developer joins on the first day, we ask that person to Actually write some code and change something on Jotform and that's like great.
And it also makes sure that we actually are handling everything else.
Like they're getting their computer on their first day, they have their accounts so you know, they can like everything is in order and then on top of that that developer actually makes a commit and then you know, updates the just form product.
Like it could be like a spelling change or like something like that.
They make a change and you know, and they see that it's not a big deal.
They can also how we develop quickly and how we, how we, you know, care about automating everything as much as possible.
And so we also apply the similar principles to like testing.
For example, we use Test IO, which is like a crowd testing platform.
And then when we, when we want something to be tested, we send it to them.
And then you know, all this crowd goes and you know, finds all these problems on different browser types and then sends to us.
And so we are aware of all the problems and we do usertesting.com also.
We use a lot that we get feedback from people about the changes we make and we try to apply automation to every part of our product development as well.
And that resulted in much.
It's not just about making it faster, it's also about the developer productivity and happiness like preventing burnout.
And when you have to wait like three months or six months for a release, it's kind of stressful.
The launch day is a big event, but when you're continuously deploying your product, it's not an event.
The new version is not a big event.
So it's been working well so far for us and we continue to automate everything as much as possible.
Omer (36:45.000)
So the product development piece and the continuous integration, the CI CD and all of this stuff, this sounds very kind of dev focused obviously.
Is there kind of like no code components to that or is this mostly just about the kind of day to day stuff that developers would tend to do anyway?
And using tools like Jenkins in terms of getting more efficient with the way they build and ship products.
Aytekin Tank (37:17.920)
I think at Chatform we kind of have, we build our own tools.
We just love to build our own tools.
We have our own backtracking system that we developed.
Our support system is also something we developed.
So we kind of use our own tools here and it's just we are so much developer oriented because when I started Chatform I was a developer, so it's just from the first day we were doing our own tools.
So in terms of the product development, we are pretty much mostly using our own tools.
Omer (37:58.400)
That's really interesting.
That's really interesting.
I think at this point of size of a company I would have expected you to say no, we don't want to be building this stuff.
We will just buy the best of breed out there.
But that's a very different kind of culture to have.
I'd love to talk about that.
But that's going to take us down a completely different rabbit hole.
So we'll have to save that for another day.
So let's get onto the third one, how you've automated your HR onboarding.
So maybe kind of just tell us what was the challenge that the team was facing and then how did you go about figuring out how to implement the solution?
Aytekin Tank (38:34.460)
Yeah, I mean this was before the pandemic.
So we were still like sending people papers and they were signing it, scanning it, sending us back to and we were doing everything manually.
It was taking us so much time and we were making mistakes and you know, someone on HR department is on vacation and someone you know doesn't sign an NDA, we forget to get their computer or things like that.
So when you do things manually that's, that creates a lot of, you know, it's easy to miss stuff, it's easy to make mistakes.
So we started kind of using Jotform for this automated as much as possible as Jotform but, but then we, we actually switched to bamboohr because we were actually in the process of getting suck to compliant and we needed to use the Suck to compliant HR product.
But now that we are suck to compliant we got the compliance, we are actually switching back to Jotform to do everything.
But the great thing is in the past we would spend so many things, we would be late, someone would start at the job and then they would get their computer late.
It was very easy to miss stuff and it was just so much time consuming.
And once we streamlined this with kind of automating every step like creating the forms and creating automated emails with instructions with collecting signatures electronically and asking you know, approvals being done.
Also online Jotform also has a approvals product.
And so doing all these things in a way that's streamlined and automated actually made it much better and we were able to do it much faster.
And when we started doing things like when we started having a bigger internship program and when we started having the part time program for students, having an existing automated solution really made it very easy for us to also add the automations for them.
As well.
And this, like, onboarding is something, you know, you don't want to make a mistake because someone is starting at your company and you want to spend your time, like talking to them, you know, being nice to them and getting them excited about the company.
You don't want to, you know, miss documents or like, you know, forget stuff and start, you know, start your relationship with a mistake.
Omer (41:15.910)
So just maybe kind of give me a little bit more details on how that works.
So, you know, the onboarding, somebody's using JotForm.
We know that if you're using a zapier type integration or automation, there's a trigger, there's something that happens, and then, you know, you're integrating with some other app to get some kind of result or outcome.
With, with, with using JotForm, how does it start?
Does it start with somebody going in and filling in a form that there's a new hire and then that does something like, where does this, how does
Aytekin Tank (41:52.240)
it actually work exactly?
I mean, it starts with.
So after the interview process, when we decide to hire someone, it starts with that trigger, with the filling out the form.
And when the form is filled out, this actually goes to approval.
And using JOTForms workflow and approval features, this is approved and someone approves in the higher management.
And then once the approval, and this is very fast because it sends an email and you see the email and approve it.
And then this will trigger all the required documents.
Like we need to call, like they need to sign some documents and you know, different teams actually receive information about the incoming person.
So like the, you know, our office, office managers, you know, they need to prepare the hardware like the computer and monitor and other things for this person.
So they, they receive notification and the start date and so they can start preparing for those things.
Sometimes people are remote, so they need to ship out those things on time.
And so we give someone a buddy and that person, from the first day, that person works with their buddy and they get to know each other and help out with learning the culture and the company.
So there are trainings, like there's a security training that needs to be completed during the first week.
So all those things are actually automated using JotForms workflow features.
And like, we also have a sign product, Jotform Sign.
And as I said, like, forms are the first point and there's a journey.
And over the years, like, we added all these steps needed during the journey, but we also have integrations with all kinds of products.
Like for example, in our sales like we collect leads with a leads form, but then that form, the data is actually sent to HubSpot because we keep track of our customers there.
So there is an integration with that.
So zapier.
And we also have some native integrations.
So yeah, we handle all those things during onboarding and.
And then we also send a survey to make sure that we didn't miss anything.
And we also keep track of the times and how long it took and if there were any errors, any mistakes about it, we keep track of them.
Omer (44:38.340)
So if someone's listening to this, let's say somebody, a founder, CEO, listening to this and thinking, okay, sounds great, but I take.
And you've been doing this for years and so it's probably second nature to you.
I can see a bunch of things that me personally could improve, but this person maybe is also thinking, I've also got a team and I can see a whole bunch of opportunities there and I've got to run my business.
So what would be some parting advice that you could give them other than reading the book?
And we'll tell people where they can get the book in a minute.
What advice would you give them to get started on this journey so it's an easier transition for them to make if they're not already doing these types
Aytekin Tank (45:27.410)
of automations, I would recommend doing an audit of their workday and answering two questions, what should I be spending my time with and what I shouldn't be doing?
And the second question is more important, what you shouldn't spend your time on.
Like what kind of task that's taking your time and they shouldn't be taking your time because you are a business owner.
Like you have a sales business and the most important thing for you is to grow your business and grow your product, make your product better and bring more people to your product.
So you should be spending your time with those things.
So I would start with an audit and that would help them even if they don't automate them.
And automation is also a delegation.
Like when you automate things, you delegate your work to the machine.
So that's going to help them with their time and help them discover how they are spending their time.
Omer (46:38.140)
Awesome.
Great.
So the book is called automate your busy work, do less, achieve more and save your brain for the big stuff.
If people you want to check it out, you can go to SAS Club IO Automate book.
And the book is being published, you said May 16th.
Great.
So, and again, you know, congratulations on what you've been able to do with this business from from the, you know, the early days of just the idea.
And, and I love this, this whole concept that, you know, we often talk about follow your passion.
And this was a passion in the sense that you passionately hated building forms and it kind of led you on this journey to where you are in this business today.
And clearly I think you know, this, this, this, this automation stuff is not something that you've just started doing.
It's been something that for a long time you've been trying and implementing in your own day to day life and with the businesses has grown so we can see the results and hopefully this will be helpful for other founders as well to free up some time and start focusing on the things that are really going to drive their business forward.
So I appreciate you making the time to do this and congratulations on where you've taken the business and I wish you and the team the best of success for the, for the future.
Aytekin Tank (48:01.640)
Thank you Omar for having me on, on this show.
It was great.
Thank you.
Omer (48:06.200)
My pleasure.
All the best.
Cheers.
Aytekin Tank (48:08.520)
Bye.
