Omer (00:11.440)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the 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 talked to Itaken Tank, the founder and CEO of JotForm, a SaaS product that helps people to create and publish online forms.
Itayken used to work as a developer for a media company and he was continuously building online forms for the editors, such as surveys, polls, quizzes, and so on.
He didn't enjoy creating those forms and he thought the work was pretty boring.
So he decided to research and find a product that would help him do his job.
The only thing he could find at the time was SurveyMonkey.
But he didn't just wanna do surveys.
He wanted to be able to do a bunch of things with online forms.
So he thought to himself, if I ever quit my job and start my own business, this could be a potential product that I built.
And as it goes, one day he did quit his job and started building exactly that product.
That was 12 years ago.
Today, JotForm has over 4 million users and generates seven figures in annual revenue.
In this episode, you'll learn how Itake and validated his idea without doing any customer interviews, how he got his first 500 paying customers without doing any marketing, and how he's bootstrapped a seven figure and profitable business with no debt.
I think you'll get a ton of insights from this interview, so I hope you enjoy it.
Chaikin, welcome to the show.
Aytekin Tank (01:55.660)
It's great to be in your show.
Omer (01:57.660)
Well, let's start by my icebreaker question, like, do you have a favorite quote that inspires you?
Or maybe in your own words, just tell us what gets you out of bed every day.
Aytekin Tank (02:07.900)
My favorite quote is by Steve Jobs.
Stay hungry, Stay foolish.
I think this quote is about having a learning mindset.
Why being foolish is so good?
Because if you are not fooling around, if you're not trying different things, you might get stuck on your local optimums.
You might reach some success, but the success becomes your prison.
Then you keep doing the same things all the time instead of trying different things.
That's why I love this quote and that's what I try to do in my business.
Omer (02:48.010)
So let's kind of give the listeners a kind of a overview of Jotform.
So can you kind of tell us, like, what does the product do?
Who's it for?
Aytekin Tank (02:59.130)
Jotform is an Online form builder.
You can easily create pretty much any kind of form using JotForm.
Most common use cases include signup forms, event registration forms, payment forms, surveys, enrollment forms, lead generation forms.
And there's no, like, one single Target customer for JotForm.
Pretty much anyone who works in an office needs forms.
And our business is kind of similar to, you know, spreadsheets or word processors or email that, you know, if you work in an office, you need forms.
And we, we think that the world actually has not discovered the power of forms.
And it's kind of our mission to get the world to adopt using online forms.
And we believe that that will actually increase their productivity and efficiency.
And we host 10 million forms for our 4 million users.
Some of our clients include Tesla, Facebook, Harvard University, American Heart association, and BBC.
Omer (04:10.760)
Online forms isn't exactly a glamorous product, but why do you do it?
Is online forms a passion of yours?
Aytekin Tank (04:22.680)
I would say it's a passion of mine.
I can tell you this story of how I started this company, how I decided on this idea.
Basically, I was working in this media company in New York City and we had these over 100 websites and we were, you know, I was working with these editors, and I was.
One of my duties was to actually help them with forms.
You know, we needed to create forms for questionnaires, surveys, polls, you know, when they were doing awards, you know, they needed nomination forms, voting forms.
And while I was building all these forms, I was thinking, okay, I was thinking, like, you, like, forms are not that important.
I mean, that should be a tool so that I don't have to spend this time, you know, it, it's.
I shouldn't be, as a developer should be creating this form.
There should be a tool so that, you know, the, our editors could just go and create these forms.
And I looked around what's available out there, and I couldn't find anything good.
And that's when I knew, like, Jotform, like the idea of Jotform actually came to me at that time.
And after I left that company, I worked there for five years as a web developer.
And after I left there, I was thinking about, you know, various products.
And I also had some site products that were actually selling, but I thought that I was going to, you know, I should build like the biggest pain I saw when I was working and that was, you know, creating forms.
And so the idea is that even though maybe forms are boring, we want to take that.
Take that boring task is make it as simple as possible so that you know, we, we can take that pain away from people.
And, and even though, you know, forms kind of look boring, they actually save a lot of time.
And our users actually save so much time because they use forms because they don't have to communicate so much.
Like, let's say you are actually, you know, let's say you have an event and like you have to email all these people, you have to talk to them all the time and try to figure out how to, you know, make sure that, you know, get them rsvp, talk to each one of them.
Instead, you could just create a form and, you know, get them to fill that form, send you all the required information properly.
Like, use things like, you know, validation or conditional logic in your forms to make sure that the data you receive is in a proper format, which saves you time.
You don't have to go back and forth with the people.
So it's about saving time, it's about productivity.
Omer (07:19.570)
Yeah, no, totally.
And I wasn't being flippant with my kind of question about, hey, is it a passion of yours?
Because, you know, I know from my own research that you didn't do this because you're passionate about building online forms.
You did this because you saw a problem and you wanted to solve that problem.
And that was kind of one of the important lessons that you learned about building a startup.
And, and just with that sort of approach of just finding a problem to solve, you, you've gone on to, to build a company with, you know, over 4 million users and 100 employees, and you guys are profitable.
So that's, that's an awesome place to, to be.
Aytekin Tank (07:58.970)
Thank you.
Omer (08:00.490)
So when you had this idea for Jotform and you kind of started building this on the side, how did you, like, how long did it take you to build that first version of the product?
And, and what did it do?
I assume there was just a, you know, a couple of core things it did when you launched.
Aytekin Tank (08:25.660)
I actually quit my job in 2005, summer.
So, and I started working on Jotform.
And the great thing was I, before, before I quit my job, I already had these side products that I sold to people, which actually gave me so much experience with, you know, talking with customers, you know, doing pre sales question answering them, doing customer support, understanding customers, all those kind of things.
I gained that experience on the side while I, I was full time, I was employed full time, and by the time I quit my job, actually I was earning more from my side business than I earned from my, from my job.
So it was actually easy for me to start working on a new product because I already kind of had this.
It wasn't completely passive.
I would wake up early in the morning, you know, work on my product and then, you know, go to go to work and then come back from work.
And I would continue working on helping, you know, customers install my product on their website, things like that.
But because of that, I was able to just spend all my time on the new product.
So in 2005, summer, I started working on Jotform and I released the first version of JotForm in 2006, February.
So it's a little bit more than six months and.
But I didn't want to just build everything.
The term MVP wasn't coined at that time, but what I was doing was actually mvp.
And for example, I didn't have a paid version.
It was completely free, which actually helped me in the beginning to gain more users and more signups.
So it was completely free.
It doesn't have many advanced features, but it.
It had this basic idea that you could just drag and drop questions to your form and create your form.
And I wanted the first version to actually demo the product.
That's why I didn't actually have a homepage.
I didn't have a landing page.
It was when you went to JotForm.com, you would only see the form builder and you could just play around.
And one of the great things about that was Jotform kind of became this showcase of what can be done on a web browser.
Because at that time, this is 2006, Gmail has just recently came out.
People are always, everybody is talking about what kind of things can be done on browser of people were saying things like apps on browsers can never become successful.
They can never be as powerful as appson desktop.
And at that time during this discussion, actually I use that angle, I use this technology angle to actually get some PR for my product.
So I emailed every tech news site about my launch and I told them about how it uses this recent technologies like Ajax.
Ajax was coined like a year before Ajax.
And you know, drag and drop on it.
It wasn't like it wasn't very common to see.
I don't think there are many examples of drag and drop on the web browser at that time.
So all these new technologies that I used, I used that as to get some PR for the release of Jotform.
And I was also able to get people to come to this side and sign up and use the product by posting on some online communities.
I was part of some online communities, like Joel Spassky had a business of software forum.
So my launch news was actually posted there and I had so many comments there, and lots of people came from that and signed up.
And I had a blog.
Blog didn't have a huge amount of traffic, but it actually helped create the story because blog was linked from the homepage.
And when actually, you know, all these tech news sites, they wanted to write about the product they had, they were able to, you know, find more details about the history of what, you know, what's going on, why it's so important.
And even my blog was called, you know, web apps are the future.
And that was, you know, today it's.
It's.
Yeah, it's not feature.
It's today web apps are, you know, they can even be called past.
Now.
It's.
Everybody is talking about mobile, but at that time, you know, desktop apps were more powerful than the browser apps.
So, you know, it was kind of.
It wasn't a conventional thing to say.
And.
And the other reason Jotform gained so much, so many signups in the first year was because it was free.
And until 2007, March, we didn't have a paid version.
So I wanted to see the adoption.
I wanted to see how people, if people like it, if people use it.
Before I worked on the paid version.
So it was kind of an MEP and it worked and people talked about it and people were signing up for it.
And in 2006, we.
We had 15,000 signups.
And today we get that.
We get more than that in a week.
But at that time, it was a huge number for me.
I never seen such adoption in my other products.
And in 2007, when I released the paid version, the premium version of the product, when I released it in March, I think we had like more than 20,000 signups.
And I sent the email and, you know, people started upgrading.
Like, the first upgrade came from a university in Spain and then someone from UK and then someone from us.
And that was really exciting to see.
People are actually ready to pay for the product.
And during 2007, we were able to get 500 paid users during that time.
Omer (15:00.630)
And so you had 20,000 free users and then of those, 500 converted to a paid account.
Aytekin Tank (15:10.150)
Yes.
Omer (15:11.590)
Why did you start with a free app?
Because you said you've quit your job, you spent six months building JotForm.
Why go with a free product?
Like, why wouldn't it make more sense to try to charge something for it.
So you can at least see how.
I mean, anybody will sign up for a free product.
Aytekin Tank (15:36.410)
Yeah, I think the main reason is my previous experience when I was in college, even before, like I worked full time for this media company when I was in college, I released this open source product and like I was part of this student organization and I was building their website.
And while I was building their website, I actually made this membership section on their website.
And this is 1998 I'm talking about.
And I created this product that can be installed on a website so that you can have a membership section in your website, membership and profile section in your website.
And I thought, you know, maybe other organizations or other websites might use this.
So I just put it out there as an open source product and people actually liked it and people started using it and people actually started sending me checks so I can customize it for them.
And in the senior winter break of 2000, it was 1999, it was 2000 actually, winter break, senior winter break, I actually worked on the paid version of the product and I released it.
And I, you know, I was able to.
People started actually buying that product.
So that was my accidental discovery that if you, if you release things as.
As free to the world, that if you, if you try to sell it and if you are just.
I'm just a student, I have no idea what marketing means or I have no idea how to sell it.
So I accidentally discovered that if you provide it as a free, you actually get people to use it and they, they want to pay for it.
So that discovery helped me actually get into the business.
So if, if I hadn't had that, maybe I, I would never become.
Start my company in the future.
But that discovery taught me that, listen, that you know, you can actually get feedback from users, you can get people to adopt your product if you release it as a free product.
And I guess maybe that was the reason that I released the first version as a completely free product.
But I think one other reason was I didn't know if it would actually turn out to be successful.
I just wanted to see if people would use it.
And when you need to create a paid product, you actually need so many more things like free product.
People are ready to just play around.
And that was kind of my MVP to see how people would react.
Omer (18:31.560)
And when you built the paid version like it didn't, you still kept the free product as well there.
Aytekin Tank (18:38.680)
Right.
Omer (18:38.840)
This was kind of like a freemium model where everyone can use the free version, but if you want more functionality
Aytekin Tank (18:45.920)
you can pay for it, I guess.
Yeah, definitely, because I guess this is probably an experience.
When I was a student, I wouldn't pay for any product.
So if something had a free version, I would use it kind of.
So probably because of all those experiences, I, you know, I believe that having a free version is, you know, is a good way to get people to start using the product and, you know, get a taste of the product.
And even today we have a free version and we have people actually trying the product all the time and we have limits so that, you know, if you, if you receive more than 100 form submissions per month, you upgrade to the paid plan or if you need features like payment integrations with PayPal or Stripe, we still allow those things on free version, but you can only get three payments per month on those features.
So we still allow people to actually try the product and if they are a heavy user, they have to pay.
But if they are just using very seldom they don't actually pay.
So we have lots of free users who don't pay.
And one great thing about this, the cloud is that it doesn't create too much work for us to keep those free users.
So I think we see that as a marketing expense that having taken care of the free users and we even provide support for free users.
Because here's the thing, if free users become successful, then they will actually upgrade to the paid version.
And by providing free support to free users, we are actually able to get more and more people to become successful with chat form.
And in turn they, they in turn become paid users and they start using it for more.
Like typically someone will start with a single form, a chat form and then you'll start seeing like there.
They start using it for very, very different reasons.
Like you, we have users with, you know, hundreds of forms and you know, they will maybe start with an registration form that they, you know, they get people to sign up for some, some event or some, some product they have, something they have and then they will, they will also create a lead generation form and then they will create a survey and then they will start using it a lot more as they discover all these, you know, form templates that we have, we have like, you know, 10,000 form templates people can actually pick from.
So we give them all these different ideas about how they can use Jotform in different ways.
And as they become more power users, they kind of, at some point they have to upgrade.
I think the, I think it was 2D up.
I can't remember the name, but One of the Evernote was famous about this, that as people use Evernote, if they become stay as an active user at Evernote, they have, they are more likely to become a paid user.
I think it's very similar at chat form.
If someone is, you know, even if they are free user for many years, if they stay active, they will gradually increase their usage and they will become a paid user.
So I think it's working out well for us.
And many of our competitors actually, you know, don't, don't have free versions and, or they just disable everything on the free version.
I don't know how that works for them.
But we are not focused on profit too much.
We are more focused on growth and we have a long term view and it works for us.
Omer (22:58.370)
So when you got those first 500 paying customers, do you remember what you were charging?
Aytekin Tank (23:05.770)
It was $9 per month at that time.
Omer (23:09.370)
Okay, so it was kind of like just under $5,000 a month you were generating.
Aytekin Tank (23:16.330)
Yeah.
Omer (23:16.730)
Okay.
Aytekin Tank (23:17.450)
Today our lowest plan is $19.
So we didn't increase the pricing a lot in the 11 years since then.
Omer (23:28.700)
Okay, so you've launched the paid version.
You're getting almost $5,000 a month in MRR and it was still just you.
Had you kind of taken on any help or were you using kind of any vendors or were you doing everything?
Yeah.
Aytekin Tank (23:48.060)
In 2006, fall, the year that I released the free version, I actually hired my first employee and that's how I was able to work on the paid version.
Just make sure that we are adding all these additional features that are asked about.
One of the great things about having a free product is you get more users.
So as we had 10,000 signups, not all of them become active users, but if as the time went on we started receiving all these feedback, all these requests from our users and we used that feedback to work on the paid version.
And I hired someone, my first employee, a developer in 2006, even before we had the paid version.
And then next year 2007 when we released paid version, I hired my second employee.
So we actually grown very slowly.
Like you know, first year one employee, second year two employee, third year three employee.
And we gradually, we were growing very gradually
Omer (25:03.770)
and like kind of beyond what you talked about in terms of kind of getting the word out.
I mean from what I heard, you know, the using the sort of the AJAX technology, being able to sort of kind of write off the back of the media buzz around Gmail kind of was one approach that kind of helped to spread the Word, having a free version, your blog, and then kind of sharing in these online communities.
And that kind of got you that initial kind of momentum.
But beyond that, what were you doing to start growing this business and what were the kind of the, when you look back, what were some of the significant things you did that took this from a business with 20,000 users to 4 million users?
Aytekin Tank (25:58.830)
Yeah, I think the biggest one is working on the product because when I look at the numbers for these last 12 years, I always see this uptick.
Every time we have a major improvement in our product, we start getting more and more signups.
And I think one of the reasons is our biggest growth engine is word of mouth.
People actually telling each other about Jotform because they use Jotform, they are happy with it and they, they talk about, about it to other people.
So by having good product, by providing good customer service to all these users, we are able to get them to talk about Jotform to their friends and colleagues.
I think the second one is the product has a virality in Ceph.
It's not viral like a social, you know, social, social sites, but it still has some, some kind of virality because every time you send someone a Jotform form, you're actually, you know, those people are actually seeing the domain name in the URLs.
And half of our users use Jotform on their pages on their websites, while the other half actually uses forms by themselves.
Just email the form to, you know, they just put the form in, some put the link somewhere.
So by having the Jotform domain name in the URLs that people send to each other in the form URLs.
And the second one is by having branding on free user forms.
And this was actually a growth engine that I really resisted.
Like we started actually doing this last year in, in 2017 and we were, until that time we were getting like, you know, thousand signups per month.
And we were actually able to increase that number to 300,000 signups by, per day by just adding.
But I just started adding Jotform branding at the bottom of our forms.
And I have been resisting that idea for a long time, but my employees actually, you know, our growth team actually convinced me that, you know, we need to do that.
And we did an initial small test and we found that, you know, people are clicking on that those brands brandings at the bottom of the forums and people were actually clicking on them and people were signing up for them.
So, so, and that kind of Increased the virality of the product and other growth strategies we use is.
I also already mentioned the free version.
Free version allows people to actually try out the product and use it for like small projects.
And then as they use it and they actually, they find more ways to use the product and they, they also, by using the free product, by sending all those URLs to each other, they are actually letting other people know about Jotform.
Another thing is SEO.
Having a good SEO helps us gain lots of users.
One of the tricks we have is basically, and we receive lots of support questions.
Like we receive more than 500 support questions per day.
And when you create a support, when you send a support question, you can actually, there's actually option to send it publicly or privately.
And basically we made it default to public.
But, you know, people can actually make it private.
But when they submit a support question publicly, what happens is that it kind of shows up in our support system, kind of like a support forum.
And what happens is that we have so many.
We have over 100,000 public support threads that provide both social proof, because people can actually see that lots of other people are using Jotform successfully from those threads.
Even if they see a problem about chat form, they can see that we are actually taking care of those problems as well.
So we are not afraid to show bad things.
I think if you are attentive and if we actually solve the problems, I think it's still good because nobody is perfect.
But if you are able to solve those problems quickly, it's still a good social proof.
And those form threads are also great for SEO because people ask those questions in very different ways.
And people actually search those things also in very different ways too.
So by having all those form threads that have those titles and content that talk about, you know, what people search on Google, we are actually able to gain lots of users from our support forum.
And we have other content on our site too.
And I think SEO is a really important growth channel for us as well.
Omer (31:56.510)
So that's really smart, right?
I mean, just by making the support public, you're.
You're kind of providing social proof because other people can see what's going on and how you're solving problems.
It's kind of becoming, it's helping with SEO and getting organic traffic.
And it's a, it's a great knowledge base that people can look for to kind of find problems without having to always, you know, contact your support team about it.
Aytekin Tank (32:22.740)
Yeah, exactly.
They can actually search and find previous threads and they can join the discussion and they can ask for things and it works great.
Omer (32:35.550)
Jotform isn't the only form building software out there.
And over the last 12 years of building and growing this business, I'm sure you've seen competing products kind of come and go.
Um, but you guys are still around, you're growing, you're profitable.
What, first of all, how do you think about competition?
How much time do you have?
You, maybe it's different today, but let's say in the early days, how much time did you spend thinking or worrying about the competition?
Aytekin Tank (33:16.130)
I didn't really because here's what I found out.
You don't actually have to, you don't need to worry about competition because even if they have a great idea that you are missing out, customers actually come to you and ask for the same idea.
So you don't actually, you know, I don't even check what our competition does and because if they have two great idea that you are missing out, someone will actually ask for it anyways.
And because we listen to our customers that we are coming up with better ideas and if they have a good idea that actually comes around and let people let us know that.
And I think it's just competition does something and you don't know if it works or not.
So it might look like it works for them, but you have no idea how it works for them.
So I think it's just a waste of time to worry about competition too much.
And we try many different things.
And I think one of the ways that we really come up with creative great ideas is by talking to our users and we interview our users.
We have a user research team that spend most of their time talking to our users, talking to our customers and finding out, you know, what's working for them, what's not working for them, and how, how we can improve our product.
So yeah, I, I don't really spend much time on competition.
Omer (34:58.960)
What about in terms of differentiating your product was that as you were kind of building it in the early days, did you kind of look at competitors products and sort of think about how you were going to be different or stand out in the market?
Or did all of that come from feedback you were getting from your users using the free product?
Aytekin Tank (35:22.850)
I think one thing that I learned over the years is the founder of the company defines every company is defined by their founder.
If the founder is a salesperson, the company is sales focused.
If the founder is a designer or a consultant or you know, something else.
In our case, if the founder is a developer.
The company is more focused on product and technology.
So if you think about it that way, every company actually has their own advantages and disadvantages.
And we are more, you know, we are really focused on the product and most of our employees are actually in working on the product and you know, we spent much less time on, we haven't, you know, we first, we hired for our first salesperson just last week.
She started last week.
So.
Wow.
And, and.
We are more focused on product and you can see it in the product.
It's just much better product.
And we are always improving the product all the time and rebuilding our form builder or this year we are actually working on, on our data tools.
How people use their data with the forms they receive with the data they receive on the forms.
That's why it's just, that's why I think it's, you know, our product compared to the competition, our product is much better.
And this is where we have strengths and I prefer, you know, focused on our strengths this way, you know, while listening to our customers, of course, and by listening to our customers we find areas that we are weak but we always solve those areas.
Omer (37:39.360)
We've kind of, I mean it's a great story we've kind of shared in terms of, you know, you were at a, working as a web developer at a company, you saw an opportunity, a problem that you were having.
Eventually you quit your job, built a free product, got lots of users, then built a paid product, got paying customers.
And it hasn't been an overnight success story, but you've gone from zero to kind of where you are over the last 12 years.
And I know you don't talk about revenue, but with over a hundred employees and kind of, you know, what you guys are charging and the fact that you're profitable, you know, my guess is that you're, you're comfortably a seven figure business.
So it kind of sounds like everything went well, everything went to plan.
But tell me about what didn't go well.
Like what do you look back and sort of say like that was something I wish I had done differently or something I learned a very valuable lesson from.
Aytekin Tank (38:48.150)
There's some mistakes that I can think of if you start early.
I think in the early days one of my mistakes was because we were a bootstrapped business and because I already had this other products that, that were, they were selling.
I, I didn't complete the focus on Jotform.
I would, you know, I would also work on these other products and you know, improve those products and do Consulting for other businesses.
So all those things actually took away from my focus.
And during the probably first three years, I spent maybe half of my time with other things.
And this actually slowed our growth.
And this is, and this is, you know, I love being a bootstrapper and it has been successful for me.
But this is, you know, one of the things about bootstrapping that that makes it hard.
So you have to actually spend doing consulting.
And of course, if I knew that, you know, Jotform would become this successful, if I had hindsight, I would have probably spent less time doing other, you know, working on the other products and doing consulting in the beginning.
But at least, you know, even in 2006, I hired an employee and I told him, like, just work on Jotform.
And because my time is divided, so you just focus on that.
And that actually helped us continue to grow.
So, so I was doing consulting and, you know, working on the, selling the other products.
And then everything I gained would actually go into in those, would be invested in Jotform.
So it wasn't completely, you know, wasted, but I would have probably spent more time on Jotform and less time on the other things.
I think another mistake that we made was it was around 2009 or 2010 that we learned that it's not a great idea to work on the product behind closed doors.
And we worked on the new version of Jotform and we were working on this new version for a year and then we released it.
And until that time, we weren't aware that, like, so many people actually depended.
So many people's business actually depended on Jotform.
We weren't aware, like, the growth we had.
It was only we would see the numbers, but we didn't actually see the, the, the, the volume of the, you know, business going on at Jotform until that we did that release.
And I think it was 2009 that when we released that new version, suddenly, like, everybody was angry at us because we changed so many things in the product and they were actually depending on these things every day.
And even the design of the email they receive when someone fills the form was changed.
And then they, you know, some of the features they were using were changed and just that complete change actually thrown those people off.
And that was a big lesson for us.
So after that nightmare release that we spent like next three months fixing all those problems, users said we fixed everything.
I mean, we might have lost some customers, but we fixed everything.
But more importantly, we learned a lesson.
The lesson was don't do big releases behind and don't work on the product behind closed doors.
Instead work on these incremental releases and improve your product constantly.
And I was also reading Eric Rice and his blog about continuous improvement and lean startup.
And after that we actually changed the way we work and that made a big difference for us.
Another, another lesson we learned was also about, you know, how we create the product.
And what happened was when we reached like 15 people, it, it was getting really hard to.
I think it was around, around the time, you know, it was probably like 2014 or 2013.
And when we reached 15 people, in the beginning, when we were like a small team, like we were this five person team, we would work really well together, we would discuss everything, we would come up with great ideas and we would execute those ideas.
But when we grown over 10 people, we were actually, you know, what I was doing was I was assigning all these different projects, different people, and suddenly we stopped actually discussing about things among ourselves and everybody started doing their own thing and it just started not working well.
And the lesson was instead of doing it like this, like everybody works on different things that we should have, we should go back to those early days which, you know, when we were five person or when we were like a three person company that we were so much efficient and we would create much better product.
What we did was after that we started working with these product teams, these small cross function product teams.
And today for example, we have five product teams.
Each one is cross functional.
They have these designers, front end developers, back end developers, sometimes data scientists, so people from different functions.
And each product team actually have their own office space and they have their own whiteboard.
They sit together and they can close their door and they can spend their time discussing about what they're building.
They have actual freedom to actually work on, decide what to work on, how to work on it, and just they can come up with really good ideas and execute those ideas.
Having everything they need within that room kind of makes them like a startup.
And this actually creates, they are able to come up with great product ideas and execute those ideas thanks to the way we work.
Omer (45:41.380)
That's a great setup and those are some really great lessons you shared there.
So thanks for doing that.
So, all right, it's time to wrap up.
So we're going to get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Aytekin Tank (45:55.740)
Sure.
Yeah.
Omer (45:56.660)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received
Aytekin Tank (46:01.900)
release early and often and learn from your users.
And this I learned from Eric Rice and his Lean Startup moment.
And we apply that to pretty much everything we do at Jotform.
Omer (46:18.840)
And what book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Aytekin Tank (46:22.840)
My favorite book is the Goal by Elihy Goldrat.
It's about tier of constraints, how bottlenecks and constraints limit you.
And so instead of optimizing everything, you should focus on your constraints or your bottlenecks.
For example.
One example I can give is just I was talking about the how we have these product teams and one of the things we have is every product team has their own designers.
And looking from outside, if you had a consultant come in and you know, look at our product teams, you know, that consultant would probably told us, you're wasting so much time of the product designers, you should just have one product designers and you should have these product teams share them.
But we believe that our constraint is having a great product and producing a better product much faster.
So by not utilizing designers 100% of the time, we are able to actually improve that constraint.
Omer (47:37.420)
Yeah, that's interesting.
I've probably had almost 200 book recommendations and never came across that one.
So that's a new one here.
Aytekin Tank (47:45.500)
It's a great book.
It's actually a novel.
I would definitely.
It's a really fun read.
Omer (47:51.260)
I'm going to have to check it out.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Aytekin Tank (47:58.760)
It's focused.
You know, I see this in less experienced entrepreneurs.
They try to do everything at once and that just doesn't work.
And it's just good entrepreneurs find the, you know, biggest constraint that block the growth of the company and go after that constraint.
And yeah, I think focus is the biggest attribute.
Omer (48:25.310)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Aytekin Tank (48:31.870)
It sounds like promoting my own product, but it's Jotform.
And the one reason I use Jotform my own product a lot is because every time I use it, I actually find problems and I'm dogfooding myself to find problems.
And the other reason is it's actually great for keeping track.
Forms are great for keeping track of things.
For example, I send myself daily emails to remind myself about, you know, doing things.
For example, if I'm dieting, I send myself a Jotform form.
Every day I auto, you know, every day, every morning I receive this email that asks, you know, that, you know, links to a just form form that I have to enter my weight so I can look at that chart and see if I'm, you know, losing weight and if, you know, if I, if I'm, if I need to keep track of a project, the status of the project, I can create a form and just ask the, you know, lead of the, you know, the team that works on that project.
And I can, you know, and I can, I can make it sent every day so they, they fill the, the status of that project.
So I'm aware of this status every day.
And for example, I do things like these days I'm writing lots of blog posts on Medium and I send myself these automated emails to track how many words I write every day.
Omer (49:59.680)
And yeah, that's a really interesting kind of use cases.
I never even imagined using something like JotForm 4.
Cool.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time I've been thinking about?
Aytekin Tank (50:15.140)
So one thing that I do is my family's hometown is in Turkey and they have these olive gardens.
I actually own some olive gardens as well.
And every winter I go there and spend a week, at least a week, sometimes two weeks, picking olives.
And one of the, one of the problems I saw was that it's really hard to, you know, after you spend time picking olives, what you do is you actually, you need to sort those olives.
And you know, some of the olives are, you know, broken and some of them are like red or green.
You need to sort them by size, small, large, because when you sell it to corporation, you need to, you know, put them in different baskets.
And so what I was thinking about was this crazy idea is just having this machine learning, AI powered machine that can actually sort.
There's currently a tool that can actually sort others by just having this assembly line that they can fall into different sizes of holes so that you can separate them on different baskets.
But what if you had this machine learning by just looking at the picture of the olive?
It can just look at and see the size, color and quality of the olive and put it in a different basket.
And I was thinking about that, but probably I would never do that.
I don't think it would earn any money.
But as I said, it's a crazy idea.
Omer (52:00.670)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Aytekin Tank (52:04.830)
Yeah, Jotform actually has three offices in two continents and we have offices in San Francisco and in Turkey.
And I actually spend lots of time in different places.
So I'm sometimes in Turkey, sometimes in San Francisco.
And we also have these remote employees from 20 different countries.
We have this support team, and they work using upwork and they're from different countries like Philippines or El Salvador.
The manager of the support team, she's actually from El Salvador and she works from El Salvador.
So we are very international company.
Omer (52:50.650)
Wow.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Aytekin Tank (52:57.550)
I would say, you know, the picking olives is really, really fun for me because I spend a week just, you know, on top of olives, olive trees, and looking at these beautiful view of, you know, mountains, and just it clears my mind.
And it kind of reminds me of Bill Gates and his Think Weeks.
He would go for.
For a weekend just without anybody else and just think about stuff.
And he wouldn't take, you know, any colleagues or any family members to these Think Weeks.
And it's kind of like that for me, too.
Like, my mind resets and I have a much clearer mind.
And sometimes I came back with some interesting ideas from those olive picking days.
Omer (53:49.500)
That's so funny.
It's like when you were talking about that, I was thinking of Bill's Think Week as well.
And funny enough, like when, like a long time ago when I was at Microsoft, I actually wrote a Think Week paper.
And, you know, people said, hey, you know, you know, Bill, Bill kind of reads them, but don't expect any feedback or anything like that because he rarely does that, you know, for a small number.
And actually, it was my first Think Week paper, and I actually got Bill read it and actually wrote a whole bunch of.
A whole bunch of feedback on the paper, which was pretty positive.
And that for me was like, you know, one of the highlights of kind of being there.
Aytekin Tank (54:25.390)
Right.
Omer (54:25.630)
You know, Bill actually read something that I wrote.
That's awesome.
Aytekin Tank (54:29.750)
You should probably, you know, put it online or something.
Yeah.
Omer (54:34.510)
Cool.
Aytekin Tank (54:35.230)
I take it.
Omer (54:35.830)
Thank you, man.
It's been really.
It's been a pleasure, you know, having you here and kind of hearing the story of Jotform and sharing all your kind of lessons and experiences with us and just kind of going into, you know, you went into a lot of depth in a lot of areas, and, you know, I appreciate you kind of doing that.
And, you know, 12 years is a long time to be working on a business, and some of those kind of memories sort of fade away after a while, you know, I appreciate you kind of taking us through, you know, right from the early days.
Aytekin Tank (55:02.360)
Thank you, Amar.
Omer (55:04.199)
Sure.
No, my absolute pleasure.
Aytekin Tank (55:05.880)
It was my pleasure.
Omer (55:08.760)
Both of our pleasure.
All right.
So if people want to find out more about Jotform, they can go to Jotform.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Aytekin Tank (55:22.590)
They can.
They can.
They can find me on Twitter or they can just send me an email@itakinform.com and yeah, I would be happy to hear from them.
Omer (55:36.510)
Awesome.
And I love kind of your blog on Medium as well, so I'm going to include a link to that in the show notes as well.
I think there's some great stuff there that people might want to check out.
They've enjoyed listening to you.
They'll get more stuff over there.
Awesome.
Thank you.
I wish you all the best and good luck with the future of Jotform.
Aytekin Tank (55:59.580)
Thank you very much.
Omer (56:00.780)
Take care.
All the best.
