Aytekin Tank, the founder and CEO of JotForm, shares his journey of getting his first customers and the strategies he used to grow his business. He emphasizes the importance of making the product free, leveraging technology for PR, and building a community around the product. He also discusses the significance of AI in today’s market and the value of customer feedback in product development.
Takeaways
- Free product launch
- Leveraging technology for PR
- Building a community around the product
- Importance of AI in today’s market
- Value of customer feedback in product development
Chapters
- 00:00 Getting the First Customers: Making the Product Free and Leveraging Technology for PR
- 06:52 Transitioning to a Premium Version and Building a Community Around the Product
- 19:37 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs: The Role of AI and Marketing Strategies
References & Links
- Company website: JotForm[1]
- Aytekin Tank’s Book: Automate Your Busywork
Aytekin Tank Interview Transcript
Paris Vega (00:01.258)
Welcome to the First Customers podcast. Today we have Idaqon Tonk with us. He is the founder and CEO of JotForm, a company with 25 million users. Idaqon, welcome to the show. Looking forward to talking to you about how you got your first customers.
Aytekin Tank (00:20.077)
Yeah. Hi, Paris. Thank you for having me on your show.
Paris Vega (00:24.352)
So let’s get right into it. How did you get your very, very first customer?
Aytekin Tank (00:29.474)
Yeah. So when you’re starting out, I think there’s these two big problems. So the first one is how can you have a good product or service? How can you make sure your product is good? It’s well. The second problem is how can you bring people to try your product, use your product? So those two things are the challenges. So I didn’t want to attack
those two big problems at once. So what I did was I decided, okay, I’m just gonna make my product free. That’s how I started. So 2005, long time ago, right? I quit my job and summer I quit my job. said, okay, I’m gonna work on this product for like next six months and then I’m gonna release it and I’m gonna release it for free. And 2006, February, I…
know, release JotForm to the world. So I made it completely free. And when I made it free, so now I’m dealing with the biggest problem, right? How can I bring traffic to my product? In that angle, I decided that I’m going to actually try to do PR by using the technology angle. my product, JotForm is an online form builder, but
Back then, it’s like products actually like you actually install software on your computer, right? You would actually go and you know download and install software to your computer, right? You didn’t use products on the browser like Gmail just came out a year before So Gmail is this new product like new kind of product that you can actually use on your browser Salesforce probably came or came earlier, but you know, it wasn’t very famous. So
this idea of SaaS was just happening. it wasn’t like very, like even this, the word SaaS wasn’t invented back then. But basically like having a product on the browser, having this like a product where you can actually drag and drop fields into your form, like just create your form on the browser, single page app, drag and drop, instant edit. Like these were like new things. So.
Aytekin Tank (02:54.55)
What I did was I just did PR, just emailed all these technology news sites. And they said, OK, I have this website. It’s similar to Gmail. It’s a single page app. It’s a cool app. I use the technology angle. So if today I was coming out, I would actually use the AI angle, because everybody wants to talk about AI. But back then, it was kind of this need.
technologies like using JavaScript to create a software was an interesting idea. So that’s what I did. I emailed everyone and I launched on it. There was this business of software forums. So I was kind of a member there. was just, you know, I wasn’t posting a lot, but I was actually, you know, reading a lot. But I knew what the audience was like people who were creating their products.
And for example, the founder of Darmesh was there as well. Like when I launched, he actually wrote a reply there as well. Founder of HubSpot, Darmesh. HubSpot, And so that was like, you know, I also use that community. So, and that actually started rolling the balls. Basically, I started getting these, you know, first signups. So in the beginning, I was getting like, you know,
Paris Vega (03:56.63)
the founder of
don’t know what that is. okay.
Aytekin Tank (04:15.566)
100 visitors per day, maybe 20 signups per day. then the great thing, and the other thing I did was I didn’t want people to, I didn’t want to put a block in front of people when they wanted to try my product. I just put the product right on the homepage. So when you went to jodform.com, you would just see the form builder and then you would play with it because I wanted people to play with it.
mentioned to others and that’s exactly what happened. People started mentioning to others like, hey, here’s this product that’s interesting, try this product and you could just try the product and if you really wanted to use the product then you had to sign up and it was all free. So in the first year until March 2007, more than a year it was completely free.
And a year later, I already had like 15,000 people using this product for free. So I just launched the premium version. said, okay, hey, we now have a premium version. It’s just $9 per month. Just go and sign up. And right away, I had like 500 customers in a few months. Like just people actually upgraded to paid version. But the important thing was,
There are like two issues, right? How can I have a good product or service? And how can I bring people to it? So I solved that problem, bringing people to it, but my product actually sucked in the beginning. It wasn’t that great. But because I had all these free users and I actually had this… I actually did support on a forum. So basically I had this phpvp on javtforum.com where people could just write to me.
Paris Vega (05:47.732)
Hahaha
Aytekin Tank (06:02.19)
And people saw that when there is a problem, when they requested something, like I would come back next day, I would say, hey, it’s fixed. Or I would say, hey, I’ve prevented that. Let’s just go and use it. So this kind of created this community around the product. And people actually knew that they can, like there’s only a single person behind this product. That was obvious.
But they knew that I was really dedicated and I was just fixing everything and I was adding all the features they requested. it was free. I had a year to fix the product, just make it so good that people would pay for it. And I actually hired my first employee. September 2006, I hired my first employee. And I said, OK, I’m just going to…
more focus on this existing customers, just fixing things for that. I want you to just work on these few features so that people will pay for it. I added PayPal integration so people could, because that was one of the most asked features, how can I collect payments from my forms? They were asking things like that, like how can I send emails to multiple people? I don’t remember.
many of them, but basically all those questions like features that were more complicated than just I could implement in a single day. I told my, you know, my hire, you know, just go build this and I’m going to deal with the users, just make them happy. And then we built those, we called it the premium version. We added some like cool features, like cool looking features, like, you know, improve the design and
things like that and then we released the premium version. And I remember like just, you know, we sent the email very early and then because it was so early, first, like someone from Spain, a school from Spain, because it was very early for the US because you know, if there is a problem, we wanted to catch it beforehand. Someone from Spain, they upgraded, right? And then next someone from the UK, they upgraded and then…
Paris Vega (08:07.712)
Gotcha.
Aytekin Tank (08:15.502)
Upgrades from the US came and it was a great moment even though I was just getting like nine dollars and I was lucky because you know, I had my savings I kind of had other products as well like these small products that was kind of selling as well They were very successful, but you know, they actually have like I was just you alone So I didn’t have a lot of burn rate. I didn’t have a family. I was this single person and so
Paris Vega (08:29.983)
Okay.
Aytekin Tank (08:45.012)
I worked for another company for five years before I started JotForm. I worked for this New York media company. And actually, the idea for JotForm came from that time because we had like over 100 websites and our editors would come to me and ask me like, need this form, I need that form. Like they needed contact forms, surveys, polls, questionnaires, like contests.
you know, forms, things like that. I would just build all these forms and I hated it. Like I just didn’t want to build another form. So I was looking for another product, but I couldn’t find any other product. So I decided, okay, I’m going to build this product and I’m going to, you know, start my own business and rest is history.
Paris Vega (09:30.998)
That’s an incredible story. It’s like the classic SAS story. I feel like at this point in history, you know, that’s what a lot of the like developer entrepreneurs are striving for is like that storylines like I’m going to launch a freemium product and then flip it pro version and, you know, sail off into the sunset. So that’s really cool to hear. And you are truly just a solo developer at first. And so how long before you hired?
Aytekin Tank (09:56.494)
Yeah, mean, 2005 to 2006, September 1st, like first year, I was alone.
Paris Vega (10:07.4)
Okay, wow. And did you hire that person before or after you launched the premium version?
Aytekin Tank (10:14.83)
I launched it on February 2006. So six months after I launched the product, I hired my first employee.
Paris Vega (10:24.126)
Okay. And so the premium version hadn’t launched yet, or you did have the premium version.
Aytekin Tank (10:30.734)
Yeah, so that was like 2007. So the time between me just quitting my job and earning my first $9 from that customer from Spain is like one and a half years. Yeah.
Paris Vega (10:33.962)
I got you.
Paris Vega (10:45.3)
Wow.
that’s good to hear that timeframe of what it takes. And then I’d like to back up a little bit because I think, you know, one of the things that I’ve done in the past is make that kind of judgment error where you hear this story. It’s like, you just got to launch something that solves a problem. And, you know, it’s an instant success or whatever. But one, it took a year and a half of you building and, you know, making it better and better, answering customer questions and all that.
in that kind of customer feedback and improvements loop. But before that, like you said, you had a career and you’d launched other several other products. So let’s back up a little bit and get into like what your profession was before and maybe a little bit about those other products and how you got the first customers for some of those other things you’ve done.
Aytekin Tank (11:38.222)
So I developed my first product while I was a student, when I was in the university studying computer science. We had this students club and I wanted to, at that time Facebook didn’t exist. I’m talking about 1998. Facebook didn’t exist yet. just like we needed this membership profile.
section for our website. We had a website. We just needed that. So I did that. I built this product to create these profiles, like sign up, log in. And at that time, it was actually very difficult to do things like that. And I actually released it as open source. So when I released it as open source, I actually started gaining traction. People were actually using the product. There was this site point.
Paris Vega (12:33.45)
What was it called?
Aytekin Tank (12:35.258)
a news setter that I was, what’s that? I was a profile manager. I called it profile manager. So, and a side point, news setter was a big thing at that time. Like they featured my product as an open source product for free product. And I received downloads. So I actually had people, so because it was a free product, people actually started asking me,
Paris Vega (12:37.898)
What was it called, that first product?
Okay.
Aytekin Tank (13:01.39)
Can I pay you to just build this feature for me? And I was like, yeah, sure. I’m a student. I need that money. And I did that. I went there and just built those features. And I received a check for $150. Wow. That’s amazing. That was huge for me. And then I decided, OK, this is working. So I will.
build a premium version. So I built profile manager premium. And it was selling a fiv a month. But the problem was, it was actually very difficult to install. You had to install it on your website. It was written in Perl CGI, which doesn’t even exist now today. It probably exists, but nobody knows about it. It was very difficult to install on your website.
What would happen is that people would get it, they couldn’t install it, so I would install them for it, just spending a lot of time helping them. It wasn’t very scalable. And I didn’t know much about marketing. I didn’t know how to market this, just get people. So I never thought that when I graduate, I’m gonna start this business.
about the graduates. So I found a job working for this media company in New York, internet.com. And what I would do is like, every morning I would wake up, I would check the emails, like I would receive some support emails, I would answer to them, maybe someone needs purchase the product, I would just install it for them. And I would go to work. And then when I finished the work, I would come back home and then
I would receive a few support questions, few installation help requests and I would do those things. So it was kind of like a side product, but it actually helped me a lot. I actually learned a lot. I had a website, I learned about SEO. So I always recommend, if you are gonna start your own business, don’t just cold quit your job like I did. I did that, but I don’t recommend it.
Aytekin Tank (15:24.078)
and then just work on it. Just start out on the side. Just start building things on the side because you will learn a lot. And I worked there for five years and during that time I was also doing all these other things. So I kind of understood what it takes to… I understood that why this product didn’t work because it was hard to install, hard to use. It wasn’t very easy.
I needed to build a product that people could just go and use it right away. They didn’t need to install it somewhere. I wanted them to just try it, use it. And in the beginning, JotForm was all about, you would actually put the forms on your website. Today, more than half of JotForm users, they don’t put it on their website. They just use the forms in their business.
But at that time, they would actually… So it was a similar product. You would still use it on your website, but you wouldn’t need to install something, software on your server. So it was easy to use. Most people couldn’t just install software on their server anyways. But putting this HTML code for your form was easy. Anybody could do that. Anybody who has had websites could do that. So I understood that…
Paris Vega (16:33.493)
Right.
Aytekin Tank (16:48.98)
If there is blockers in front of your product for people to use it, then those blockers are not just like, you know, if the if a blocker is like it takes them like half an hour, it doesn’t just like reduce your like number of people who use your product by like, you know, 10%. It actually reduces by 99%. Because you want people to be able to quickly like just use the product, right? If you if you if you have things that prevent
people from trying your product, using your product, it’s like, you know, those blockers are so huge. Like even at JotForm, like we had this product, we still have it by the way, but almost no one uses. Like we have this mobile app for JotForm, right? And in our JotForm enterprise product, you can actually like just make your own mobile app, right? For your forms.
But because it’s required that you need to go to Apple and Android, you need to create your developer accounts and then you need to take this code and upload it. So because it’s required like so many steps, like no one uses this, right? It’s just, it’s about making it easy to use. It’s about make like just solving those blockers that’s in front of your product or service. And if someone can just use it
use your product or service quickly and just easily, then that’s going to like, you you’re going to have 100, 100, 100 times more users than, people assume that these problems are not that big, right? I will have them, right? The problem is like, people will not even ask for your help. if, if something is difficult. Yeah.
Paris Vega (18:42.656)
How did you decide when to move on from one side project to another? Like, I’m assuming the profile manager is shut down at this point. I know that can be something that’s difficult for entrepreneurs. get lots of ideas started and you don’t want to let go or kill the baby, so to speak. It’s like you always want to hope that it could work eventually.
Aytekin Tank (19:07.746)
Yeah. So yeah, I didn’t want to build a product that’s only used by a few people. And so that’s why I decided that, you know, and they didn’t have any growth. Like they were maybe selling, you know, a few, I was selling just, you know, a few license of my software per month. So it wasn’t enough to like build a business on it, right. On top of it. So
I decided I needed to build a product that can scale, that can actually grow to become a big business, big product. I never thought this big, right? Today, JotForm has like 600 employees. We have offices in like, you know, seven different cities and just, you know, 25 million users. I didn’t think that we would be this big, but I thought that, you know, I would, you know, I wouldn’t be like the single person. I would hire people and we would grow.
So that’s why, like there was no growth. I think that’s the big thing, right? So at JotForm, we actually build all these additional products for our users. And then we build a new product. What we do is like, we actually just quickly release, maybe take like one month or three months to quickly release an MVP, minimum viable product, just minimum version and see if people are actually using it. Like if there is an adoption, right?
If no one is using it, either we pivot it, or either we just try to find out why people are, maybe it’s the user experience is broken and then people cannot figure out how to use it. And we try to fix it, but if we cannot fix it, we just abandon that idea at all, completely. But even with that minimum version, if people are using it, we have something.
people use and we release it to like 1 % of our users. And then we start building on it, right? We start adding features. We get feedback from users exactly like how I built JotForm in the beginning, right? Just release an MVP, get feedback, fix the product and improve on it. And the growth is about like, do we have this line that’s always going up and right? And if we don’t have that, if it’s a straight line,
Aytekin Tank (21:33.07)
then it’s not gonna work out. It’s not something you can build on. You need to be able to grow the product. And how do you grow a product? You improve the product and you bring more people to it. even if you improve the product, even though you’re improving the product and bringing people to try it, and then even after that, if you cannot get it to go up,
and write, then I think it’s time to abundance. Just find a product that works. And that’s what I did. Like a few products I had before, they didn’t have any growth. So I didn’t actually abandon them, by the way. Just like I would wake up, answer questions for my side products, and then I would go to the office, work eight hours, and then come back home and answer my customers.
I would actually do the same, right? I would actually wake up and just answer customers and then I would go up on just form and then just like continue doing that. that kind of, I had that side, additional revenue to help me out while I had this free product.
Paris Vega (22:59.466)
So you did have other products that were bringing in money while you would quit your job and focused on job form. Okay. So it wasn’t like quitting your job and just living off savings a hundred percent. had that side revenue coming in already. Right.
Aytekin Tank (23:05.154)
Yeah, that also helped. had my savings. Yeah. Yeah. That also gave me confidence because I already had some, you know, I didn’t have any like burn rate. Like I wasn’t like, hey, I was gonna run out. That actually helped me make that decision, right? Because I wasn’t running out of money that I also, you know, went back and started living with my family.
That also helped like my burn rate, just back to zero. And that was very helpful. So I could actually go on more if I wanted to, like just.
Paris Vega (23:46.688)
So the other side projects, they were fully covering your expenses at that point.
Aytekin Tank (23:51.052)
Yeah, they were actually covering my expenses.
Paris Vega (23:53.802)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, I think that’s a huge point there because that’s a temptation, whether it’s from frustration or just having the big dream, thinking I’m just going to quit and put everything into this. And I’ve got three months to do it. And I’ve done that foolishly before where I thought just need a couple months. I’m going to leave my job and then realize, wait, three months isn’t enough time.
Aytekin Tank (24:19.662)
Having a runway and then just seeing that going down every month, it’s very stressful, right? I was lucky I didn’t have that. And I was even able to hire my first employee. Yeah, that helped a lot.
Paris Vega (24:31.21)
Yeah, extremely.
Paris Vega (24:43.082)
I foolishly did that with wife and kids. So it was extremely stressful at the time. And then it was like, okay, I need to go get a job and worry about side projects on the side. so yeah, I think that your way is much better. It makes a whole lot more sense. Okay. And what were you studying in college?
Aytekin Tank (25:06.762)
computer science.
Paris Vega (25:07.99)
computer science, I figured. Okay. And so that puts you in the communities that you were in that you started solving problems for because you were in that industry, you were studying to be in that industry at least. And it sounds like you were just solving the frustrations or the problems you ran into along the way.
Aytekin Tank (25:26.7)
Yeah, mean, it wasn’t actually like that. created like when I was students, I actually created this product for the student organization. And then I put it online as a free product, right? And then people who were using it, they weren’t like student organizations. They were like, they were…
people were building websites. They wanted to have these communities in their websites. And I was always receiving these features. And one day, I started receiving all these from different people who saying, hey, can you it like Facebook? Can you make it like Facebook? And that’s when the Facebook actually came out. And I guess one of the reasons this product kind of wouldn’t actually work out was like,
kind of Facebook killed all those websites like community websites. And then everybody started building their communities on Facebook. So that might be another reason that this product actually didn’t have a feature.
Paris Vega (26:37.064)
you. Because just the competition exploded in a direction that, yeah, yours couldn’t keep up with at the time. Yeah, that was a wild time in the internet where everything was, you know, all the big huge companies that exist now were just getting started. I remember when Facebook came out and it was so different than my cast because you could like drag and drop to move your little profile boxes around. And that was one of the first kind of really popular drag and drop interfaces, I think, where you could
just move the boxes on your profile. And my cast, you had to, I mean on MySpace, you had to go into the HTML if you wanted to edit stuff or whatever. So yeah, that was it.
Aytekin Tank (27:16.751)
Yeah, that was my space as well, right? People were also asking like, you know, they wanted to create their own MySpace and they were using my product to do that.
Paris Vega (27:20.075)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (27:26.294)
OK, cool. That’s crazy. But it seems like job form worked out just fine for you with 25 million users now. That’s a lot of that’s a lot of users to manage. I can’t imagine, so I’m sure you’ve got whole teams of support and feedback and you still on that kind of same listening to customers and adding features, or do you guys have kind of your own sense of the product and?
customer base now and you have your own roadmap that’s kind of separate from that.
Aytekin Tank (27:58.028)
At some point I had to stop doing support because I remember a few years into JotForm, was like from morning to night, I was just answering customers. And I said, enough is enough. I just went to Upwork. At that time it was called ODesk. And I just hired like five people from around the world. I just handed this support to them.
Paris Vega (28:18.261)
Yeah.
Aytekin Tank (28:25.838)
And I needed to do that because I was able to focus more on the company and the product because of that. But even today, customer feedback is really important. So for example, today we are working on a product called JotForm AI. And we’ve been working on it for a year. We haven’t released it yet. It’s just… But we released it to a very small number of users within the product, right? And when people…
like when we release it to the better users, what we are doing is like we are like listening to all this feedback from them, right? What they are asking about. I mean, this product involves basically this product is about like just replacing forms with AI agents. So instead of talking to a form, filling out a form, like you talk to an AI agent and then
AI agent fills the form for you or answers your questions or does other things if you need to. And what we do is we actually watch all those conversations and we see where it’s failing and then we are improving the product. So with this product, we don’t even need to go to the owner of the agent, like the owner of the form.
We can actually see the conversation happening between the end user and the AI agent. And then we actually have three people. are actually watching from morning to night, just full day. They are watching all those conversations. every day they are creating these reports. I created these three bug reports. This was the best conversation our AI agent really did amazingly here.
This was the worst conversation. Our AI spectacularly failed. Our AI agent failed. And these are the features that we need to build. So they are kind of like just creating that feedback. Because when we release this product, when we release it to 25 million users, there’s going to be a lot of bugs and problems. So what we are doing is just we are maybe losing opportunities, right? So we are basically working with just like a startup.
Aytekin Tank (30:46.19)
who only has a few users. So it’s actually a feature. It’s not a bug. When you are just starting out and when you only have a few users, it’s actually important to learn from them. And the product manager for this product, I told him a trick that I used in the past. I told him, go and just send them an email. I’m the product manager for Jet from AI. I know you are using it as a better user. And just, you know.
I told her that just send an email like text email like that just and she actually made the mistake she made this like large email with you know HTML email like just we need your feedback and then no one was responding and I asked her like how is it going like what do people say about it and she was saying like no one is actually responding I told her I asked her I asked to see the email and I saw that like she’s just like big email I thought
Just one line, right? Just ask them, like, how is it going? Just not like text, just write it yourself. Don’t like automate it. Even if you automate it, just automate the text email. How is it going? I’m the product manager. Like, you I wanted to find out like how is it going. I saw that you stopped using the product. You know, can you tell me why? Just like a single sentence, it works really well. Like you have like, so like people, because people know that it’s genuine. It’s not just like automated email that’s.
Paris Vega (31:51.359)
Right.
Aytekin Tank (32:12.46)
And people actually respond with genuine answers. And then you have this conversation and you learn from your customers. And we also do user interviews. we have user researchers who are just like, they will just send emails to people who, for example, they want to find out people who use this feature. Do they like it? How do they think it should be improved? What kind of ideas they have?
Paris Vega (32:21.93)
Okay.
Aytekin Tank (32:42.094)
So what they will do is they will just send an email to them and they will say, OK, if you can spare us 45 minutes, we want to also send you this Amazon gift set phase as well for your time. Just we want to pick your brain, learn more about how you use JotForm. And then there’s a big, actually the response rate is so high on that email. I think it was like 40%.
actually give their feedback and some of them don’t even want the gift card. They just want their voice heard. know, the user researchers, they will just talk to them and find out as well. it’s even, you know, it doesn’t matter how big you are. I think you have to start slow, small and then get feedback, fix the product.
get more feedback, fix the product. It’s just very iterative process. You cannot just like, you know, close your door, build a product for a year and then just dump it in front of users. It’s not going to be useful because all the things that you built that didn’t receive any user feedback, it’s like they are shitty, right? They stink. And then if you build on top of them, like you know how like a
Paris Vega (33:59.979)
Yeah.
Aytekin Tank (34:05.454)
a big pile, right? But if you start small, if you fix it when it’s small, and then if you can build on it, and then if you keep fixing it, that’s how you create a good product. Every good product is created that way. I never heard someone actually went, worked on a product for three years and then came out and then created a good product. Every good product is actually created slowly. So it’s…
the first customers are really important. And you want to make sure that you get their feedback. Even if you have a consulting business, even if you have a service business, I think you should just offer your service for free. Just offer it for free. And I heard this, this was actually, I heard it from Alex Hormozi, right? Do you know him? Like just big in YouTube. And then even he recommends that,
The first 10 users, 10 customers, just give it for free. Learn from them, fix your product, and then give them 90 % discounts. The next 10 customers, 90 % discounts. The next 10 customers, 80 % discounts. Just go like that. Just keep building all that, learning from them. And then he even says, don’t stop when you reach your, when you’re at 100%, right?
Paris Vega (35:19.658)
Yeah.
Aytekin Tank (35:31.683)
like just increase your price, but that’s probably another topic.
Paris Vega (35:36.495)
Right, right. Get into the marketing strategy there. Yeah. OK, so I was going to ask and you’ve kind of touched on it there with what you were just talking about, but looking at where you were in history when you started, know, SAS was kind of starting and you were at the beginning there and then looking at where we are now. I think in general, the principles you’ve laid out don’t quit your day job.
start something on the side until you get traction on something, you know, just kind of, learn from the customers, give it away for free at first. So you can just go through those first iterations to get something that people actually want to use and can get value out of. but what else would you say looking at where the market is right now? And somebody’s maybe just getting out of college and they’re like, I want to be a digital entrepreneur.
you know, start my own SaaS company or whatever. Cause it seems like there’s so many SaaS products now. Like it’s insane how many things, you know, there’s a wasteland of all the failed projects and all the domain names that are, you know, no longer in existence or whatever. so what would you say to that kind of current, just starting out entrepreneur?
Aytekin Tank (36:53.548)
I think it’s a great time to start your business, your product, your service, because of AI. So in my lifetime, there was these three revolutions before the AI. The personal computer revolution, I was kind of like, I was a kid back then, so it didn’t really affect me that much. I experienced it. Yeah.
Paris Vega (37:01.642)
Okay.
Paris Vega (37:19.146)
Like the hardware side of it. Yeah.
Aytekin Tank (37:22.114)
But I actually, I still experience it even like 1990s, having a PC, right? I was still part of that revolution. The second one is the internet, right? That came out and it was huge, like changed everything. Like today we do everything by internet actually own the software actually now, if everything is about software. And the third one was the mobile.
revolution and that also changed everything. Like today we are all like walking around with a computer, with a very powerful computer in our hands, in our pockets. And the fourth one is definitely AI. AI is as big as these three revolutions. So if you are starting out right now, I think it’s a great time. Like I wish like, you know, I was just graduating from college now and I was, you know,
doing a startup. And I would recommend the same strategy I used when I launched my product, which is the technology angle. Just learn the technology, like just create something that’s very impressive to people using the new technology, because people want to talk about AI, people want to talk about the new technologies. So that’s a great angle.
Just spend the time to learn the new technology, apply it to your product. Because there’s just so many opportunities right now with AI. People are just discovering them. The big companies are also on it, they are doing their own thing. But the big companies, they’re only looking into big opportunities. And sometimes the opportunities are so small that it doesn’t make sense for a big company to work on.
But that’s going to get big in time. The market is going to explode in time. So if you can find that niche that can be really improved by AI, I think that’s a great opportunity to start a company on. And when you do it, people are going to talk about it. Because if it involves AI, people are talking about it. And it’s exciting.
Aytekin Tank (39:43.758)
So I think this is a great time. Yeah.
Paris Vega (39:47.464)
And you mentioned that you learned SEO in your earlier projects and you interacted directly with forum communities. And those are all different ways of getting that exposure, that initial exposure. And I think with your earlier products, you just literally put it on the internet and people just found it because it was back in the day, maybe when there was less competition on that side of just websites that offered what you had and that
It goes more into the SEO part of it. But what would you say about that part of getting exposure, finding that target customer?
Aytekin Tank (40:26.99)
Today it’s like if I was doing a startup today, I would definitely use YouTube. I think that’s huge. There is just social media and those are huge. But I think SEO still works well because people are still Googling things. When they need a product, they will Google it. They kind of use
Paris Vega (40:35.711)
Okay.
Aytekin Tank (40:55.16)
social media and YouTube more for exploration, discovery. But when they need a product, they are going to actually Google it. So I would definitely learn SEO as well, how to do keyword research, content marketing. I think these are still important. And they will always be important to bring traffic to your website, to your product.
It could also be the mobile product. So it’s kind of different as well. But that also involves mobile SEO. definitely, those two problems still exist. How can you make a good product? And how can you bring people to use your product? So you still need to solve those problems. So I would definitely make it free.
try to get people to talk about my product, build some community around my product so that when I release a paid version, when I have paid features, then I could actually use that community to all the users. because it’s a big cold start problem just having like
people to use your product when it’s not very good. And if they don’t use your product, it’s not going to get better. Yeah, so it’s a challenge, but I think it’s a great time to do it.
Paris Vega (42:36.958)
great advice all around. I think you’ve got a book that’s out right now. Do you want to tell us about that?
Aytekin Tank (42:45.23)
So over the years, I found out that JotForm is actually about automation because like in the beginning I was thinking, okay, I’m helping people create forms, but it turned out that forms are just like one first step in a journey. And they’re basically like people fill out forms, not just to fill out forms, but to accomplish things like complete.
make a request, register for something, apply for something, pay for something, like just buy something, or like just if it’s a lead generation form, just, know, it’s the first step in the sales journey. So I discovered that actually forms are part of this, you know, people’s workflows and we needed to automate things for them, right? So.
We started building all these additional products as well in JotForm like e-signatures, document generation, app building, approvals, workflows. So I learned so much about automation, both for myself and for my team and for our users, for our customers. I learned so much about automation. So I wrote a book about automation, Automate Your Busy Work. It came out last year and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
So you can actually find the first chapter of my book for free. Like there is a free chapter on my website. It’s my first name, lastname.com, itekintank.com and they can go there and they can get the first free chapter and if they like it, you know, get the book.
Paris Vega (44:28.264)
Awesome. Well, I can thank you so much for being here today. This was full of a lot of value. So I know the listeners got a lot out of it. Everybody go check out his book. What’s the full book title?
Aytekin Tank (44:41.216)
Automate your busy work.
Paris Vega (44:43.36)
automate your busy work. All right, we’ll see you on the next First Customers podcast. Thanks everybody.
Aytekin Tank (44:48.088)
Thank
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