Omer (00:16.079)
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 talk to Cedric Savares, the founder and CEO of FormAssembly, a SaaS platform that helps businesses to create web forms and collect data.
In 2002, Cedric moved from France to the USA and he landed a job as a web developer at a higher education college in the state of Indiana.
He found himself spending a lot of time building web forms to capture data and it was tedious and boring work, but he realized how important these forms were from a business perspective and he started spending his evenings and weekends developing a form builder, an automated way for his end users to create these web forms themselves.
It was just a side project.
He shared the project on Hacker News and people started signing up.
After a while, he added a paid plan and before he knew it, he was earning coffee money from his side project.
It was slow going, but Cedric kept working on his side project.
He listened to the feedback he was getting and he kept improving the product.
Now, the cost of living in Indiana was pretty low compared to places like San Francisco, and after two years, he was making enough money to quit his job and focus on his product full time.
But there was nothing unique about Cedric's product.
There were already a number of similar form builders on the market and it seemed like new ones were being created every week.
So how big could his little side project get and how could he stand out from the crowd?
He kept listening to what his customers told him and eventually he found one simple thing that helped him differentiate his product.
In this interview, you're going to learn what that one thing was and and you'll learn how he doubled down on that differentiator to bootstrap his little side project into a profitable business with 65 full time employees.
It didn't happen overnight.
It's taken Cedric 13 years to get there.
But it's an inspiring story on how you can turn a simple idea into a successful SaaS business.
Hope you enjoy it.
Cedric, welcome to the show.
Cedric Savarese (02:44.800)
Hey Amer, thanks for having me.
Omer (02:47.620)
So I always like to ask my guests if they have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates them or just gets them out of bed.
Is there something that you can share with us?
Cedric Savarese (02:56.180)
Yeah, it's really interesting questions because it's really hard to capture what it's like to build a software company with just One quote, but there's one that I really like is software is eating the world.
Which is something that was coined by Mark Andreessen.
And what I find really significant with this is that you, if you think about it, software is everywhere now.
It's the way you consume entertainment, is how you shop, is how things get delivered to door, it's how you're even driving your car now.
And when I think about this, really capture what allowed me as a software engineer, what allowed me to build a software company, to build a company and be an entrepreneur.
I don't have a background in marketing or sales.
I don't have an mba.
All I knew when I started was, you know, just enough to build software and I had just enough insight into what my potential customers might want.
And that, that really what got me started.
It's this incredible thing like now if you're in a software business, you have access to huge potential customer base, millions and millions of people, and your starting costs are essentially zero as long as you know how to write software.
Omer (04:12.980)
So tell me about Formassembly.
What does the product do?
Who's your target customer?
What problems do they have?
Cedric Savarese (04:19.620)
Yeah.
So formassembly is a data collection platform that allows our customers to streamline their business processes and their data collection processes through so through online forms and surveys and workflows and at the same times be good stewards of the personal data that is interested to them.
So our customers, we're pretty agnostic when it comes to who our customers are.
We have customers that are Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated environment like healthcare or financial services.
And then we have customers that are just small nonprofits, like community theater for instance.
But they all have something in common.
They all need to collect data.
They all have stakeholders that are not technical people.
They're not it.
They just have these business needs, whether it's to onboard a new customer or get a donor to fill out a form and make a donation or someone to register for an event or to apply to be a student at a school.
Right.
They all kind of have this common need to collect data, process that information and then put it somewhere there where they actually work with it.
And so that's why we design a form assembly.
And what's really important to us is to do the data collection very well, do it in a way that's secure and compliant, that kind of meet the needs of our more demanding customers.
We tend to be larger enterprise type customers.
And what's exciting is that we can because we're a pretty lean Operation and pretty lean company we can actually turn around and packages in a way that makes sense for our smaller customers, our non profits and SMBs.
Omer (05:57.910)
Got it.
Now you launched the company over 13 years ago and you have currently 65 employees and it was just last week that you closed a series A round of like $10 million, right?
Cedric Savarese (06:11.750)
Correct.
Yeah.
So that's a big change.
So we've been bootstrapped for 13 years.
So it's been a slow and long progress and over time we kind of got better at what we doing and we're being able to hire and get to that critical mass in terms of, you know, the size of the team and the talents and the skill set that we had internally where we were able to just accelerate and really grow faster.
Up to this day where you know, we didn't go to investors because we needed cash, we've always been a profitable business.
But we went to investors because we knew the opportunity ahead of us, we knew that we could deliver on it, we knew that we could go faster and deliver on the vision for the product.
And that's what's really exciting, to just find the right partner.
In which case it's Levard Equity, which is a growth equity firm based out of New York.
Really liked how they kind of thought about this and we just make it happen.
Omer (07:09.800)
Yeah.
So first of all, congratulations raising that, that round.
Cedric Savarese (07:14.080)
Thank you.
Omer (07:14.440)
But I think the real interesting story that I wanted to talk to you about was the fact that you've bootstrapped this business for over a decade.
Cedric Savarese (07:21.970)
Right.
Omer (07:22.370)
And it's been profitable and you've grown it and you've got some great customers and sort of big brands who use the product.
So I want to really dig into that.
But before we do that, tell us a little bit about your background.
What were you doing before you started formassembly?
Cedric Savarese (07:42.690)
Right.
So my background is in software and IT and I have a computer science degree from a university in Paris, France and I spent the first 10 plus years of my professional career in IT.
Mid sized business, had a short stint in a fairly large corporation and then.
And I also worked at a startup, a startup that was doing a lot of consumer service.
Omer (08:07.380)
So how did you come up with the idea for form assembly?
Cedric Savarese (08:10.750)
So that startup that was early 2000s, so still in France, just around the dot com crash and what we were doing, the idea was to just collect information about consumer habits, like asking people what type of toothpaste, what brand of toothpaste they like to buy or whether they're thinking of buying a car in the next six months.
And so there was some gamification on top of that.
But at the core it was all about getting that data, ideally selling that data to advertisers.
But the part I was working on and focused on was how we get that data in the first place.
How do we build the surveys, how do we carry out a lot of surveys all the time?
Omer (08:52.170)
Were you working somewhere for another company when you were doing this?
Cedric Savarese (08:55.450)
Yeah, I was an employee at a startup.
Omer (08:58.090)
Okay.
Cedric Savarese (08:58.890)
And then I eventually moved to the United States in 2002, I think, and then I joined.
I worked in higher education, so I joined a college and.
And one of the things I've done there is working on their online application for students to apply to the school, which is just another variation of forms, more complex, more business logic built into the forms.
And yeah, that's kind of what I put two and two together.
And I decided, you know, as a developer, it's not super exciting to be working on forms.
It's really just tedious work.
But for business users, for stakeholders, this is something that everybody needs.
It's super important.
It really helps you not only just collect data information, but really implement your business processes the way you need them to be.
And so I had this experience, I saw what it's like if you go to IT and you say, okay, I have this need and I need you to build it for me.
It's going to take you weeks or months and they're going to get back to you with few, you know, those forms and those, the database and the emails and the integration with the backend systems that you, that you need and you're going to get that.
And if it's not exactly what you needed and you want to make a change, you're back to square one.
Right.
And so we redesigned FormAssembly to allow the stakeholders to kind of own that, to build a data acquisition process that works for them, while at the same time making sure that it's going to meet IT requirements when it comes to security and compliance and oversight.
Omer (10:27.320)
So you saw the opportunity and what did you do?
Just like spend a weekend and start building something?
Cedric Savarese (10:33.670)
Yeah, it was a lot of baby steps.
Right.
I wasn't sure that it was going to work.
I didn't know that it was going to work.
And so I was like, I decided to just build something simple and it was just an early version of what is essentially a form builder.
And I just put it out there.
I think I posted it in the forum, might have been, I could use from Y Combinator forum.
And I got just enough traction, just enough interest in it that I felt like maybe I should keep working on it and just trying to slowly improve iterate over it.
It was just free and they could just use it.
And at one point I think it took me two years to really start working on it full time.
So it was a slow process.
Omer (11:11.900)
So over those two years you were just kind of like, it was kind of more like a, like a side project.
You were kind of like, yeah, it was just, you were curious and you kind of just wanted to build something for fun.
Cedric Savarese (11:23.300)
Yeah, exactly.
I wanted to see if it was going to be a viable business.
Right.
So I built it, I put it in the hand of users.
I got the feedback.
At some point I was like, you know, I think I'm onto something, let's put a price tag on it.
And there was still a free version of it, but there was like a more advanced feature that had a very low, I think $9 a month was like starting pricing.
And I just put it out there.
And for a while I think I got the first customer almost the same day or the next day, but, but just because I kind of had built that early adopter type traction for the product.
And so I was able to get customers early on, but it was kind of slow growing.
Right.
First he was paying for coffee and then it was, you know, after a while, up to the point where it was essentially paying, you know, a full time salary.
So I was like, okay, well let's do that full time.
Omer (12:15.730)
So you said you started working on it full time after two years.
So at that point was it generating enough revenue to pay your salary or.
Cedric Savarese (12:27.420)
Yeah, so I mean, I was living in a fairly, I mean I'm in southern Indiana, which is pretty low cost of living area in the U.S. so but yeah, it was, it was enough to.
And you know, we just had a child at the, at that time and felt like it was, yeah, it was enough and sustainable to sustain myself and my family.
Omer (12:49.620)
Cool.
So what happened in that second year that you went from coffee money in year one to enough to work on the business full time.
Cedric Savarese (12:58.020)
So, you know, I wish there was like kind of one thing that I did that made everything work suddenly, but it's really more about slow iteration and every time doing, trying to do one thing a little bit better and just listen to your customer and try to grow over time.
And when you are in the SaaS software, you know, when you're in SaaS business, it's recurring subscription, right?
So as long as you're not bleeding your customers, you can build over time, and that's great.
That's essentially what happened.
You build over time your revenue stream.
Now, there was about the time when I went full time that there was one big decision that I made that proved to be very, very successful, is to invest in the Salesforce ecosystem.
I think early on I had a customer that tried our product and suggested that I looked into Salesforce and see if I could integrate those two, because that was going to meet one of their business needs.
And Salesforce was already pretty big at the time, but, you know, it was still.
I didn't know about them at the time, but what, what they did very well is that they really cared about their ecosystem and building their ecosystem and making it easier, making really easy for people like me, like, who are essentially a developer building a product integrate with their platform.
So you could get a free developer account, you could get that exposure through the marketplace.
And so we built it.
We were early on at our platform, and since then Salesforce has exploded as a business, as a platform.
Marketplace is huge.
The customer base is huge.
And that really allowed us to grow and accelerate growth.
Omer (14:32.870)
So you say we built it, but back then it was just you.
Right, right.
Cedric Savarese (14:40.310)
Yeah.
Early on there was a bit of imposter syndrome where it was like trying to kind of build this thing on my own.
And through the exposure on the platform, I suddenly had access to customers that were like the amazons and the PayPal and of the world.
And they were reaching out to me and I was like, yep, yep, we can do it.
And I was the royal we.
But yeah, that's.
Omer (15:08.610)
I think it's, you know, I think where you are right now with A team of 65 people is a good sign of a good leader who uses the word we a lot more than the word I.
Cedric Savarese (15:18.970)
Right.
Omer (15:20.090)
But in the early days, it's very different.
Cedric Savarese (15:22.290)
Right.
Omer (15:22.570)
Because you were just doing everything for that business.
Cedric Savarese (15:26.650)
Yeah.
Omer (15:27.370)
So how did that happen?
I just got to ask you, you mentioned those companies, they just contacted you out of the blue?
Cedric Savarese (15:32.410)
Yeah.
Throughout the life of the company, we've always been inbound, driven.
So they find us through the marketplaces that we're on.
They find us through word of mouth.
But over time, we also build a fairly solid partner network which has been very, very good to us.
So because we're essentially a piece of a puzzle in someone else business.
And so we work a lot with essentially consultant implementation partners that are.
That have a relationship with clients that are helping those Clients integrate with Salesforce or use the Salesforce platform, or they help them with any sort of a project IT project.
And if they know about us, if they know what our product does and how it kind of fit in puzzle that it's trying to put together, then they're going to bring us on board.
And that's been a really good driver for growth on our end.
Omer (16:20.360)
And that first sort of Salesforce integration, what was it like?
Just somebody being able to create a web form and then save data into Salesforce?
Cedric Savarese (16:31.400)
Yeah.
So Salesforce today is just about anything.
You can build the entire information system on the Salesforce platform.
It started as a CRM, so a way for sales teams to manage their relationship with their potential customers and their customers.
Right.
So if you think about customer acquisition, you think about them as leads and opportunities and deals, and you run that through Salesforce.
Now, Salesforce capabilities in terms of form and data capture was actually pretty limited.
So we had this opportunity to provide a solution that was a little bit stronger and really just capture the data and help our customers get more out of the platform, out of the Salesforce platform.
Because it's.
It's true of any systems, basically, especially system of records, like what Salesforce is meant to be, is that the more data you have and the better quality of data that you have on the platform, the more you're going to be able to do the platform.
So we've always had a lot of interest for our product and for facilitating that data collection and pushing that data where it needs to be.
Omer (17:33.200)
So one smart thing you did was getting formassembly into the Salesforce marketplace.
And presumably that's what drove a lot of this interest.
But before you had done that, was most of the inbound coming from because you had a freemium product?
Cedric Savarese (17:54.240)
Yes.
So we did have a freemium product.
I think it was word of mouth and just organic growth, probably a bit of search optimization and rankings on Google.
But we didn't have the bandwidth or the team to really just manage any of that.
So it was more like, customers are showing up and let's try to serve them.
Omer (18:14.860)
And how did things change?
Like, after the marketplace was there, like, you know, overnight you were.
You were kind of getting, you know, more demand or you suddenly realized, hey, this Salesforce thing that I did for one customer is actually the main thing I should be focusing on now.
Cedric Savarese (18:31.160)
Yeah.
I think it always felt to us like it was like a very worthwhile investment for us to spend more time understanding the platform, understanding how our customers use it and what are their use cases.
I think really early on what really changed is that suddenly so not only you talk to different tier of customers, like it's not just small businesses or professionals that just reach out to you and suddenly it's larger corporations and well known brands and so on.
But what really was really interesting is that suddenly you get this wide exposure to a lot of new use cases that you never imagined and the way they kind of driving or using your product in ways you had not thought about.
So you kind of listen to them, you kind of see how they're using it and you kind of see where they're kind of struggling a little bit and you're like, okay, well maybe we should make that easier or maybe we should add this feature.
Or you know, the Salesforce platform is a very complex platform and so you, you can go very.
And we ended up going very, very deep.
And that's kind of made us not only a leader in that space, but really way ahead of our competition is to how deep we integrate with Salesforce and how well we can support a wide range of use cases.
Whether you are, if you're a runner and you're.
You want to run the Boston Marathon and you want to register for the race, what's going into that registration process is kind of crazy in itself.
And if you have some time, I definitely encourage you to go on just Google Formassembly and Salesforce and the Boston Marathon and there was a talk at the, at the Dreamforce conference, but it's powered by formassembly for the front end creation piece.
And then there's a lot of business logic built into Salesforce.
But it's kind of crazy when you think about it that as a runner I want to apply for, I want to run a race like the Boston Marathon, which is kind of an iconic marathon of the most prestigious marathon in the world.
And you can only get in if you meet certain requirements.
If you run previous races fast enough and it's all built into it.
So you apply and right away if you're not in the race.
Omer (20:33.240)
I was just trying to look online if I could find it, but we should include a link to that into the show notes.
That would be to look at how long did it take before you were able to hire your first employee.
Cedric Savarese (20:45.730)
So once I started moving full time, I think it took less than a year to hire the first employee.
A few months of just continuing growth and just squeezing off revenue that I felt like could afford a rank payroll for another person.
Omer (21:01.570)
And what type of person did you hire, was it a developer, somebody to help with marketing?
Cedric Savarese (21:06.370)
Right.
So it was developer.
And that's probably one of my big early mistake is that it's not like the person was bad or anything like that, but it's.
I made the mistake of hiring someone that was kind of like me, another developer.
And actually, first two hire were developers.
Right.
And instead, what I should have done is hiring people who would be able to support me in a more complementary way.
Like, I was doing so much in the beginning by myself.
Like, I designed the logo myself, and I built a website myself, and I was writing the marketing copy, and I was supporting, answering questions from customers and trying to build software at the same time.
And so what I needed at the time, it was not just I didn't need another developer.
What I really needed is someone to take over customer support and take over other aspects, like writing for the blog and so on.
Omer (21:58.550)
So what happened with the first couple of hires?
Cedric Savarese (22:01.110)
Well, one of them is still with us 10 years later, so that ended up turning well.
But I didn't know how to build a software team either.
I knew how to write software, but I didn't know how to run IT team to build a software engineering team.
So that kind of didn't go too well in retrospect.
It's just a lot of wasted opportunity to just do better and faster.
Omer (22:27.640)
And then.
So once you've got a couple of people on board, do you remember what it was like, what happened?
And I know this is to go back, we're talking about 13 years, and so we've kind of covered, like, the first three years of that journey.
And then at what point did you really feel like this was taking off?
Cedric Savarese (22:44.490)
Yeah.
So it's been a long journey.
And it's funny, like, today I interact with people who've been in the company for a year or two, and I feel like we've worked together forever.
So there was a lot of trial and error in the beginning, just trying to understand who we want to be as a company, how we want to grow, what we should be focusing on in terms of what software we should build, and who are customers who love a lot of things that we really didn't decide on.
We had a freemium product for a long time that was great for people who don't want to spend money on.
On data collection.
At the same time, we were trying to close customers that were Fortune 500 customers.
And at some point, you have to prioritize where you want to focus on.
Right.
And so we, you know, we hired early on, we were trying to as bootstrap business, you kind of have to try to find, you have to really be lucky in your hiring process.
You want to find some people who are good at what they do and also are affordable.
Plus, we started in the Midwest in a city that's not exactly the tech capital of the world.
So early on, you kind of had to be really lucky with who you were going to hire.
Now, Bloomington, Indiana happens to have a very good computer science program.
There's Indiana University in town, but there's a very good business school.
So we were able to get people fresh out of college on board.
And that was really helpful.
But what we found pretty quickly is first of all, people would just graduate from college in Indiana, in Bloomington, they want to go and see the world, right?
They don't want to necessarily stay in Bloomington.
And also just the skill pool locally is somewhat limited, right.
So you don't have the access to the talent pool that you have in San Francisco or New York or whatever.
So at some point we, I decided to open up position to remote employees.
Our first remote hire was out of Toronto, and he's still with us today.
He runs our partner and strategic alliances, but he came on board as essentially our first salesperson out of Toronto, working remotely.
And at some point it became clear to us that first of all, as we need to continue to grow and find great people, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the local job market and we should just hire remotely wherever we can and to make it work.
And that's kind of another big, really important decision in the life of the company is that if we really wanted to make this remote thing work, we had to be remote first.
That means even though we still have an office in Bloomington, Indiana, the office is empty most of the time, or it's just me or it's me and another person.
But what's really important is that we think about the culture, we think about our processes, we think about the way we collaborate and communicate as a remote company first.
And so that everybody's on the same page, everybody is working the same way.
And there's no privilege channels.
There's no, like, if you're working remotely, you don't have to feel out of the loop because people in the office can have their, their own decision process going on that you don't get to be a part of that.
None of that is happening here.
And really, really think about the cultures as a remote first culture.
Omer (26:00.210)
So what have been some of the toughest things to get the remote first Kind of company culture in place.
I mean, I'm guessing, like, obviously communication is a big issue, but what other challenges have you faced and kind of, what kind of things have you done to make it work?
Cedric Savarese (26:16.080)
So one thing that we do to make it work is first of all, when we hire people, we just make sure that they know what they're signing up for.
Ideally, they already worked in a remote capacity, they liked it, it worked for them, and they understand the value that they get out of it and they're willing to make it work with us.
Often they're people who have kids, they have, or they're just starting their family.
They've done the whole commuting to work two hours a day and they don't want to do that anymore.
They want to be close to their kids and they value like the work life balance a lot that we can provide.
Those tend to be like very great hires for us.
They have the experience, they understand what they're getting into and they get a great job satisfaction out of that.
What we found is that it doesn't work as well for people who are just out of college because they value the social interactions in person a lot more because they doesn't work as well.
Also for people who tend to be more nomad type, people want to be on the road, people want to travel.
They feel like, oh, a remote job is exactly what I need, so I can work from the beach.
But in reality what happens is that the travel piece kind of get in the way where we need people to be available, to be able to collaborate, to be on the job and have good Internet connection.
And so you can't join a meeting and have a productive conversation if you're in a restaurant because that's the only place you could find WI fi and so on.
Right.
But then you have all this background noise going on.
So that's kind of one of the things we've learned.
Like nomad people are probably not a good fit for us unless you're like a individual contributor and you don't need to collaborate as much.
We also found that time zone matters a lot.
For a while we had someone in our team that worked out of Ukraine and then Australia.
And what we found is that the time difference was just unmanageable for us.
There was no way to keep that person really engaged in what we were doing with such a big time zone difference.
And it's not that it can't be done.
I think it can be done very well, but it just requires more resources than we had to make it work like people who are just managers and spend time just organizing the team.
Omer (28:26.000)
So you mentioned one of the first developers that you had hired is still with you.
Do you have a lot of people who kind of, when they join you, they stick around for the long run?
Cedric Savarese (28:35.130)
Yeah.
I mean, our first customer support person is still with us now.
You know, there's natural attrition.
It's not like you.
Like, one of the things that's really important to me is not just, I don't expect people to work in this company for the rest of their life.
Like, I want this to be a very good place to work at, but also recognize that people may have different goals or different aspirations.
And at some point, if it's time for them to leave, then I'm happy to support them if we can and move on.
As I grew the company, I always fought hard about how we scale and how we make this business not too reliant on a few individuals.
One of the things that was the hardest for me, where I would lose sleepover, it was more like team issues and how dependent we might be on someone and not realizing that, you know, they might be burning out, not realizing that, you know, they're just going to leave and then we, we're going to be in trouble.
Omer (29:37.240)
And there was a situation that you had with that.
Right.
Cedric Savarese (29:40.040)
Where.
Omer (29:40.360)
Which caused a lot of disruption to the business.
Cedric Savarese (29:43.000)
Yeah.
So when you're in the situation where you have what, you know, essentially like you depend on superheroes in your team to kind of carry the weight of the business on their shoulders.
So it's great when everything's going well and you deliver to the customers and you're growing and it's fantastic, but then that person leaves.
Because for whatever reason, whether it's personal, whether you as a manager and as a CEO of the company, you didn't really understood what their expectation was, what their needs were, and you just didn't meet their needs.
Right.
And we ran into that situation where someone that we were really dependent on for just our IT operation and infrastructure just decided to call it quit.
And for weeks and probably months, we were in a situation where we were signing up customers, we were bringing customers on board, enterprise type customers.
Customers were paying premium for the service, and we actually had no way to deliver what they were buying.
Like, they couldn't sign up into the
Omer (30:45.810)
application, you couldn't get their account set up because this one person had left.
Cedric Savarese (30:49.690)
Right.
Omer (30:50.490)
Wow.
Cedric Savarese (30:51.610)
Right?
Yeah.
So it took us a few months to kind of really recover from that.
And you know it was a lesson learned.
Like it's like not only as a CEO, as a manager, I kind of had failed that person, but I also had kind of failed business because I didn't make sure that we had enough people and the process in place to make it so that we're not depending on just one person.
So the thing I focused on for the, you know, during that time was like let's hire an experienced director to handle all our operation and infrastructure and DevOps and let's make sure that that person has a budget to hire enough system engineers and DevOps engineers so that they can ran things.
And so it took us some time to recover, but we did and we're much better place now.
Now it's incredible how finding the right people to run things and really support them, empower them and give them budget to make things happen like now it's crazy because so we do the data collection, right?
And an important thing about data collection is that sensitive and personal information, there's different laws in different countries that apply to that kind of information.
And so it's important for some of our international customers for the data to stay in the country that they are.
So we have customers in the uk, customers in Germany, in Singapore and Japan.
And now because we kind of rebuilt, we had to rebuild that engineering and infrastructure team.
Now we can deploy our application in data centers on AWS across the world.
And it's just a one click thing.
You can do a one click, get your instance set up in Singapore and be up and running.
It just takes like 10, 20 seconds to be up and running.
Omer (32:39.430)
Now today, when you look at the business with FormAssembly, you've become a market leader.
You have clearly defined this space in terms of being part of the Salesforce ecosystem as well as integration with other type, you know, similar types of products.
But I want to understand how you thought about competition in the earlier days because you know, there's no shortage of form builders out there and a lot of people struggle with this, right?
I mean you've got a product maybe, you know, maybe it's not the most unique idea in the world, but you feel like you can do something better or there's a market that's underserved and, and you build a product but as you get into it, you realize there's a whole bunch of other products that do similar things.
How am I going to stand out?
How am I going to be different?
And so how did you think about that?
Cedric Savarese (33:32.720)
I think first of all you have to embrace the fact that you know, if your idea is any good, other people have thought about it before and there's going to be competition.
And when I started, I really didn't do any sort of competitive research.
I kind of found about competitors that started about the same time as we did, but, you know, just by accident.
And.
And yeah, it is stressful, right?
You're like, oh, my God, what are they doing?
Are they doing it better?
And then.
And you.
You kind of think about all the gaps, the future gaps that you have.
You're like, oh, my God, they've.
I wanted to do that for a long time, and here they are.
They have it out of the box, and you're not on your end able to.
To kind of deliver on that.
So it is stressful, and it's something you kind of have to manage.
The way I think about competition and especially as you build a software company, is that you have to find the niche where you can be sustainable and better than your competition.
So for us, it was the Salesforce ecosystem, and that allows us to grow, and then we can agree with that into positioning ourselves as an enterprise solution.
But this is really the core of it, right?
This is the heart of the challenge.
When you think about competition is like, okay, what is the subset of the market that I can go after where I can do just a little bit better than the competition, and that's still big enough for it to sustain me?
And then once you do that, if you're doing it well enough, then you can think about, okay, let's expand.
Let's see, what are the agency markets or how I can expand my feature set to attract a larger customer base.
Omer (35:03.339)
I was talking to another founder recently, and he mentioned something about when I started out, I never realized how big a business I was actually starting to create.
And I kind of wondered the same with you, that when you went full time and then you started doing the Salesforce integration and you hired your first couple of employees, did you see the opportunity being as big as it's become now in terms of, you know, 65 employees and raising $10 million for this business?
Cedric Savarese (35:42.510)
So in your back of your mind, you kind of always kind of hope for the tremendous success and you feel.
But realistically speaking, you just don't know, right?
It's really hard to tell.
Early on, if you had told me, well, you'll have 60 people in your company, I'll be like, what are those people going to be doing?
I have no idea why we need so many people now that we're 65, you know, I definitely see the need for us to be, you know, 100, 150.
If you told me, like, three years from now we're going to be a thousand people, I'll be telling you the same thing.
I have no idea what those people would be doing for us.
But just the reality is, is that you get to this point where, like, okay, I see why we need another person here and another person there.
And so that's kind of how you grow now.
There's plenty of businesses that are very successful, that are smaller, that essentially scale revenue without necessarily scaling.
I mean, we've been able to scale revenue without scaling the team, the size of the team too much.
But you could even go to a further extreme.
But I think at some point, you're kind of limiting yourself into what you really want to accomplish.
And it's not like it's a bad thing.
You just have to decide really what you want to be as a business.
And to me, I was always excited about trying to explore and really find, like, demanding customers, like, challenging customers challenges, and see, like, okay, what is it that they want?
Okay, and how do we get there?
Like, if.
Does that mean we have to worry about compliance with, like, something like Fedramp, which is very, very strict compliance requirement to.
In order to deliver whatever software you want to deliver to the federal entities, federal government in the U.S. to me, I don't see that as a wall, as something that's going to stop us.
I see that as an opportunity.
It's like, oh, okay, well, if we can be Fedramp compliant, first of all, that opens us to a new market.
And then, secondly, well, if we're doing that well, that means all the customers, they're going to benefit from it.
That means we're better at security, we're better at how we run our processes.
In the end, it benefits everybody.
So I always saw that as strategy.
But that also means you kind of have to grow your team, and in our case, I just.
Growing the team and then raising capital.
Omer (38:01.700)
Yeah.
And I think it's also, you know, kind of worth pointing out that you've got the 65 people.
But the business has always been profitable since you started working on this full time, right?
Cedric Savarese (38:11.700)
Yeah, we only got to 60 people, because we can afford 60 people for sure.
Omer (38:16.420)
All right, we should wrap up and get onto the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
All right, Ready?
Cedric Savarese (38:26.080)
Yep.
Omer (38:26.480)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Cedric Savarese (38:31.120)
So one that I really like is from the I think Polygram at Y Combinator is Just Build what People Want.
There's no way around that.
Omer (38:39.800)
Yeah.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Cedric Savarese (38:44.000)
So that would be Don't Make Me Think by Steve Craig.
It's a pretty old book by now, but it's about usability in website and software design.
But it's really about putting yourself in the shoes of your users and understanding how they consume information and how they make decisions.
To me, I always felt like it applied to way more than just website design.
It was really eye opening for me when I got started.
Omer (39:11.630)
Yeah.
I think that book's about 20 or 30 years old, but it's still very relevant, I think.
Cedric Savarese (39:16.030)
Yeah, absolutely.
Especially if you apply it to just, just modern usability website software.
Omer (39:22.390)
Yeah.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Cedric Savarese (39:28.070)
I would say imagination, creativity and perseverance.
And that's, I realize that's more than just one.
But you know what's good about being an entrepreneur is that you get to set the rules.
So there you go.
Omer (39:43.270)
Exactly.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Cedric Savarese (39:48.190)
So one thing I like to do is check off items on my to do list first thing in the morning.
Like there's a few quick and easy ones that I can just go and take care of and always puts me in a, in a better mood for the rest of the day.
Omer (40:02.830)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Cedric Savarese (40:07.070)
You know what?
If I had the extra time, which I don't, I would probably write software.
But just for fun, I wouldn't, I wouldn't try to turn that into a business.
Omer (40:14.030)
Do you do much coding now these days?
Cedric Savarese (40:17.270)
So I enjoy coding a lot.
I've built a software engineering team so that they can do better than I ever done.
So most of my time these days is me trying to catch up and understand what they're doing.
Omer (40:30.470)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Cedric Savarese (40:34.310)
I'm an expert Candy Crush player.
I don't know if you know that mobile game.
I'm like level 1700 and I think 70 something now.
Oh my God.
Omer (40:46.920)
There you go.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Cedric Savarese (40:50.760)
So I guess I probably tend to work a lot, but I just really like spending time with my family outside of work.
And one of the things that we've started lately is with my wife, we Started working out together.
And that's been awesome.
Not only just to get in better shape physically, but also having a lot of time to.
To connect together and with my kids.
You know, my daughter is playing the piano and, you know, she's now playing it better than I do, but I kind of like, kind of spending time with her and encouraging her learning the piano and with my son.
We just started running and we.
A few weeks ago, we did a. I think it's called an extreme trail race.
It was a 10k race that was a lot of fun.
Wow.
Omer (41:35.680)
I saw a show the other day where there were these people who do this extreme trail race around Mount Fuji.
And you kind of think about, actually it doesn't look that hard, but it's actually, when you start to watch that show, it's scary how much work goes into those things.
Cedric Savarese (41:54.110)
It is hard.
And I mean, you can make it as hard as you want to be, right?
We did a 10k and you could do the marathon and you have to climb up hills and cross streams and go down ravines.
So if you want to do that fast, it's really, really hard.
But it's, you know, it's all in a good spirit and, and so you can, you can slow down and you kind of have to walk your way through a lot of it anyway because you can't really just run through the thick woods.
So.
Omer (42:20.250)
But yeah, I'd be walking most of the way, but that's another story.
Okay, great.
So, Cedric, thank you for joining me.
It's been great conversation.
Cedric Savarese (42:28.490)
Thanks, Oliver.
Omer (42:29.130)
If people want to find out more about form assembly, they can go to form.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Cedric Savarese (42:38.050)
You can ping me on Twitter.
I think it's set.
Sav on Twitter.
C, A D, A Sav.
Omer (42:43.730)
Okay, cool.
And we'll include a link to that in the show notes as well.
So thank you again for joining me.
It's been a pleasure.
Wish you all the best.
And again, congratulations on raising that round.
And we'll have to do a follow up at some point to figure out how you spent that money.
Cedric Savarese (42:59.970)
Yeah, I'd love to.
I think it's going to be an interesting experience going forward.
So thanks again for your.
For the time.
It was really enjoyable.
Omer (43:05.650)
My pleasure.
Take care.
Cheers.
