Automating Success with JotForm

Automation does not save you time. What it does is it saves you the work that you don't want to do so you can focus on the work that you love. This is just one of the pieces of wisdom that my guest today is going to share with us and he should know because he has over 25 million, that's right, 25 million customers for the automation products that he has invented, built. He's fended off Google and he is on the show to talk to us about how he's built Jotform. We're joined by Aytekin Tank from Ankara in Turkey. Ayta Kin, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim, for having me on your show.

It's my pleasure. Because we all know Jotform, it's an amazing platform for automation. But you're going to kindly share with us some thoughts about automation. As a pioneer in the industry, you're building your first websites back in 2000. So you've had over 25 years really of building platforms and tools for us. But also we're going to look at how you fended off Google when they tried to enter this space and also about your golden rule of the 5050 when it comes to building your business. So, Eitan, why don't you tell us first of all about automation and then we'll talk about Jotform. But automation. Why should an entrepreneur care about automation for their business?

Yeah, let me tell you my story, how I started really focusing on automation in the early days of Jotform. I would actually like, when we were this small team, I think we had like three, four employees at that time. And I actually made the mistake that's described on the Emit mystery book, which is like working in your business as opposed to on your business. So I was actually buried under busy work. I was like doing everything, accountant, legal, hr, ordering supplies for the office. Like, I would do customer support from morning to night and I would do like, you know, deal with emails, I would do everything. And right at this moment, something happened and Google actually came out, came into the ring. Google came out with the product, Google Forms. So here I am, you know, I built this innovative product to make creating forms easily and now I have to compete with Google. And the problem was I wasn't actually improving my product as much as I should have been and I needed to find a solution. And when I looked into like deep inside, looked into like, how can I solve this problem, you know, I remember that I'm actually a programmer. I worked as a developer for another Company. And before that I studied computer science. So, you know, I'm a programmer. I know how to automate things. So why am I, why I am spending so much time like doing all these things, all these busy work by myself, right? So I decided, okay, I'm going to automate and delegate everything so that I can just focus on the product, like really improving my product so I can compete with Google. And so like one of the things, early things that I did was I delegated the support. Like, I just went to upwork and hired like five remote employees around the world. And then I said, okay, you take care of the support. You know, I got out of that and like I was dealing with emails like so much, like just so much email stuff. Like, just, I was just looking at the same emails again and again because there was no priority in my emails. Like, just my inbox was a mess. And then I actually thought about like, how can I automate this? How can I automate the way I process my emails? And I actually discovered that like I actually looked for all these different products. Nothing really worked for me. But then I actually looked at Google Gmail and I discovered that Gmail actually has so many powerful features. I first thought like writing these scripts, but you know, I could actually accomplish the priority stuff with just using the filters and labels and using, you know, Gmail's features to build this priority inbox for myself. And that also saved me like, you know, probably like three hours every day. So it just, I started building all these automations for myself and that saved me so much. And the way we developed our product, the way we try to get like more customer for our users, all those things, I actually started automate more and more and then I applied the same principles to, to I, I started teaching the same principles to our employees. I started, you know, applying the same principles to our product because like our product is also an automation product. Like people use forms, they don't use forms just to, you know, people don't fill out forms just to fill out forms. People fill out forms so that they actually need to like accomplish something, right? They need to apply for something, register for something or like pay for something. Just there is a workflow and if it could help people on the next steps, then we can actually, if we can automate more and more stuff like our users who, you know, the owners of the forms can actually save more time. So we, I started applying the same principles to my product as well. And this actually resulted in me, you know, my efficiency and productivity improves and our Product improved, our team improved. And the result was like, our growth actually improved and our product improved. And as a result of that, just from became much more successful. And yeah, and I actually shared all the, you know, all the things that I learned during this journey in a book. I released that book last year, Automate your Busy Work, and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Well, that's amazing to have been, you know, both an entrepreneur and then also an author. And for those people, obviously I will include Ayta Kin's book in the show notes. It's called Automate youe Busy Work. And of course, as always, I put a link in the show notes. Just back up just a little bit. How did you go from building web forms as a programmer to getting your first tranche of customers? If you can maybe go back before Google entered the market, how did you get your first tranche of clients?

Yeah, so before I started Jotform, I was actually working for a media company in New York. And so we had these like over 100 websites and. And we had these editors, and I was this programmer and I was a developer. And, you know, our. Our editors would come to me and they would always ask me, like, can you build this form for me? Like, just. And like, just building like so many forms during that time. Like, I just. And I kind of hated it because, like, it wasn't very challenging. Like, just building these HTML forms, connecting them to these emails and databases. It wasn't that exciting. Like, I could be doing more exciting stuff, but I discovered that there is a big need for this and I actually wanted to just give this work to something else. I tried to find this tool that could take away this work from me, but I couldn't find a good product. And that's when I knew that I should be starting Jotform. I should be starting this business. And that's how I came up with the idea. Because, like, I solved the need in my previous job. So when I first, like, released Jotform, so I quit my job in 2005, summer, and then I worked on the first version until, like 2006, February, and then I released the first version. And because I built these side projects in the past, I knew that, like, biggest challenge was actually the marketing. Like, getting, you know, getting pr, getting like, people to like, discover my product. Like, that's the hard part, right? Because you can build a great product, but nobody hears about it. You know, it dies because it needs people to use it. So I thought about it, and at that time, I Used the technology angle when I released the product, right. As my PR strategy. And what I did was Gmail just came out a year before Jotform, right. So people were talking about this new type of product that could actually work on browser, right. Today it feels weird, right? At that time you actually installed software in your computer, right? We also use something called CD ROMs, right?

Yeah, I go back to floppy disks. Yeah.

People like young listeners probably never heard of them, right. So, so my kids definitely don't know about them. So I actually just, you know, I started blogging talking about how the web applications are the feature like that was my blog like web apps are feature and people were saying hey, you can never do Photoshop on the browser. And today we know that, you know, Figma Beats, it's a browser product and beats Photoshop. Like just. There's just so many examples like that and everything, everything became browser cloud based during this time. But at that time it was something interesting. So this to showcase my product, what I did was I actually created this like form builder that could work on a single page. Because at that time like you would actually, when you use like browser products, you would actually click on a link or button, you would go to another page, right? I built a single page app where you could actually drag and drop stuff that people never saw before. It was very new, like just being discovered recently and just like instant edit, like you could just click on something, edit it. That was also not seen much. So all these ideas Gmail introduced and the new products that were coming out, new JavaScript libraries were coming out that were like. So that was like the techniques was about this, like this, you know, building these single page apps on the web. So I use this kind of technology angle as my PR strategy and that worked. So you know, all these tech sites, like I started posting on forums, like I post, I actually launched on business of software forums. So I talked about the, you know, technology angle. So as a result like I received out of links out of mentions on the techniques sites and that kind of created my initial initial traffic. And that was useful because I really also had a useful product. So you know, people came in and they became, you know, users and they started mentioning to others and the snowball started like. But I needed that, that initial, initial traffic, initial number, initial initial users, like initial maybe thousand users. That that's how that I was able to build that using technology angle. And if you are doing a startup today, if you're doing a startup today, it's the AI angle, right? If you just have an AI product, people will talk about it and just people will feature it. So I think that that's a lesson that's like all, that's a, you know, evergreen lesson that any entrepreneur could, can use anytime.

Yeah. And this idea that you get to your first 1000 trial customers through building something useful, demonstrating it in real time and giving it away for free. And we're going to talk a bit later on about pricing strategy, aren't we, Isaacim? But let's just talk about automation. Because you are an automation guru, it'd be wrong of me to miss out the opportunity to get you. Just explain for those of us that are not very good at it, maybe one or two reasons that we would use automation. What sort of rules or guidance would you give to someone thinking about automation?

Yeah, so, I mean, when I started the, when I was writing the book, actually the AI craze wasn't that big. So it's kind of my book kind of in a year kind of became old. But I think the ideas, the principles that I talk about in the book still applies today, even a year later. Even though the examples, like just every kind of every week, like if I write the book, they automate your busy workbook. This week, the examples I include would be like old next month. It's just the, the amount of changes happening every month is just incredible. Just so many things coming out, just announcing new products are being announced. At Chatform, we are also working on AI products, but the automation principles, the automation ideas stay the same. So I can talk about those things. In the book, I talk about automation principles. And the first principle is clarify your priorities. Because automation is still a tool, it's not going to decide what you should be doing for yourself. And in the book, I talk about the time audit which you create this spreadsheet. You make a note of how you spend your time. Maybe every hour you just make a note. I wrote emails, I created this report, I answered this customer, right? And you create this audit for a week, right? And at, at the end of the week, you total them up, right? And then you, you come up with this total that says, okay, you spent this much of time doing this, you spent this much of time doing that, right? And then I want you to ask like two questions. What should I spend my time on? And what shouldn't I spend my time on? And when you look at that, those totals with those questions, like which of the, like what are the tasks that you spend your time on that you shouldn't be spending your Time on. And the most important question is the second one, the time you spend on things that you shouldn't be spending time on. So that's why I want you to focus on automating those things first. Like automate or delegate them. Like just get rid of them. Because it's not just about the time you lose. It's also about your focus, your energy, your motivation. Let's say in the morning you wake up and you look at your computer and then you start going into that, like answering emails, just doing all those tasks. Right? But this was your most, like your best time, right? You are most creative time for you. Maybe it's different from everyone. Some people are like, you know, they prefer to work at night, but whatever is the best time for you. You shouldn't be spending that time in things that doesn't matter. Like, that really doesn't matter. Like a year from now, they're not going to matter. Right? But if you spend your time on things that really matter, that's, that's really what you should be spending time on. So the automation, you first clarify your priorities, you automate those things that you shouldn't spend your time on. And the second one is harness your laziness and impatience. Because there's a Bill Gates quote and he says that I will always hire a lazy person to do a hard job because that person will find an easy way to do it. And if you're too patient, if you are too hard working, that's not helping you. That's actually, you know, you are, you, you gotta say, like, enough is enough. Like, I'm just not gonna spend any more time on this. And, and that brings me the third pro, third principle. You need to make time to save time. You need to spend time to do research to kind of understand how your, how you do stuff, like how you spend your time and like what kind of tools can help you so that you can actually save the time in the end. So yeah, if you become impatient, if you become lazy and impatient and if you take the time to learn the tools, just use automation as mentioned. And today it's even more possible. There are all these fast tools that can actually take away many tasks from you. And now they are like with the, with the AI, they are becoming even more explosive because AI, you know, I'm also building an AI product for JotForm and just, it's incredible because AI is so fuzzy. Like just in the past, we will build products by just building like this, you know, buttons and text boxes and like just, you know UIs, right? Today we can build products just by really understanding the, kind of understanding the intentions of the users, you know, goals or objects, objectives of the users and kind of, if we can understand them without even clicking, clicking a button, then we can actually create something for them, a result for them. Right? Just AI makes it much more easier for product builders to create products that can actually do much more. So it's going to get even better and better over time and the automations will get. That's why I think the automation principles matter even more now. And the fourth principle is the embrace systems thinking. You have to have this mindset and I talk about the automation flywheel in the book, I don't need to get into that right now, but it's about building your system. Automations are just single parts of these systems, but you are building a system overall system and you need to be able to kind of build and iterate on your systems. So basically you are, instead of being this individual contributor who is doing everything, you are becoming this manager who is actually managing all these systems, all these automations who are working for you. So as a manager, what the good managers does is they look at, they kind of first train their people, right? So you train your automations, you build your automations and then they give them feedback and they kind of watch their effectiveness. Look at the numbers, be aware when there's something failing. So you have to have the systems thinking idea to be able to build your automations and be the manager and be much more productive and effective.

That's why you're the expert. Aisha. Ken, I'm Twitter Isaacin Tank, who's the founder and CEO of a company called Jotform. What I will ask you though is about overwhelm Isakim because you've just explained four principles which include really sort of the automation and if you like delegation and perhaps the assassination of tasks and the need to think of having a systems approach to your business. For those of us that are not tech oriented or don't come from a tech background, where do we start? Because automation and now using for example bots and I was looking yesterday at creating a, you know, a bot for creating a storytelling to, if you like, be the handler for ChatGPT because otherwise you're dealing directly with ChatGPT, aren't you? You can use these bots now to kind of manage the GPT, but where does a person start? Because you're already at the sort of 20,000 foot level. But if someone hasn't got any automation and Any processes. Can you give us advice of what would be for like the first step, Is it a spreadsheet where we write this does this and this does this, or is it a piece of paper? Where would we start? Because I think for many of us it's getting quite overwhelming.

I mean we start with the biggest pain, right where we are wasting most of our time. And sometimes the automation is not easy because it's not like a single task. There is a workflow. So there's like multiple steps going on. Like you need to send an email, someone needs to reply back to you, then you need to do something else. Right. So I would actually start with the biggest pain and that's actually about the priorities, right. Like the time you are wasting on those things that are not really high priority for you. They are actually taking your time. Right. So you start with your biggest pain and then the next step is to kind of do your research. Like what tools people use to accomplish this thing. Right. Before calendly we were wasting so much time, just back and forth. It's crazy. Just calendly saves us so much time because it's a product that allows us to just put our free available time out there so people can actually go and just pick the time for us. Right. So just what's the biggest pain? You know, what makes us really, you know, gets us angry. Like just. And just try to find the products that can help us just do the research, you know, make time to save time.

Yeah.

And just try something. Just, just start with something small, something automate something small and then you can build on it. Right. But you kind of need to timebox it. If you don't timebox it, you're going to be, you are going to, you are. Because the reason that you are actually doing automation is because you're so busy. But if you're so busy to even not automate things that you are going to get more busy. And so you want to kind of time box like just, you know, one block of time every week that you say, okay, this is my OPEX time, right. This is my operational excellence time. This is my automation time. Right. Just I'm going to focus on automation. I'm going to learn something. I'm just going to go to g2.com I'm going to search for one of the tasks, like one of the workflows I have and then just find a product that can actually help me. And I'm going to read the reviews because they tell me like how other people are actually solving the same problem or I'm going to go to YouTube, just search about it and just watch someone actually solving the same problem, automating the same problem. Right. And today is a great age to do that because 10 years ago this wasn't possible because just the number of tools we have, the number of automation tools, number of SaaS tools we have is incredible. Yeah, it's becoming, it's a great time to actually automate.

But I think what you've also said there, for those of us that are not, excuse me, tech savvy, is the need to set some time apart to think about automation. Because we often thought, you know, sales, marketing, hr, manufacturing, distribution, and now it's really a discrete job function, isn't it, to think about automation as a management function in the same way we might think about spending time on finance. So that's really, really useful. Now you've managed to scale the business. You've got 650 people, 25 million customers. Let's just look at how you've managed to grow from a branding point of view, Jotform, because you've obviously navigated the issue where Google came in. But Ajtaqin, have you then grown to be this really global player from Turkey, which isn't necessarily known for being a tech center. It's not coming out of Silicon Valley, for example, or even maybe out of parts of Germany or the uk. So how have you managed to build that brand globally?

Oh yeah. I mean, one thing that helped me was I was in the US before, before I started Jotform. So I worked, I lived in the US for nine years, so that kind of helped me. Studied in the US and worked in the US and just kind of, and worked in a, like a media company and got that experience to kind of understand, like, you know, what's needed. Just I think that that was a, an important background to have. But, and, and the reason I went back to Turkey was I kind of, I, I'm a bootstrapper. I'm still a bootstrapper. Jotform never received an investment. Eighteen years later, I'm still bootstrapper. And I was, you know, when I decided to grow my business and decide to hire like developers. Okay, yeah, I'm going to go back, I'm going to reduce my, like, I'm going to go back, move back with my family, with my parents and just reduce my Runway to infinity because I had no expense. Of course I started my office space and hired employees, hired developers, programmers, but I always kept that balance, just always spend less than I earned. And after. After some years, I was able to go back to US and start our, you know, San Francisco office. And just, you know, we still, you know, we have an important office in San Francisco as well. And, you know, our marketing and sales teams are actually in the US but in terms of scale, how did we get the scale? I think there are two things that are really important, which is. So one of the things is Jotform is free. And the other one is Jotform has some viral. It's not like viral as like a social media product, but it's. It has some viral because people actually share forms with each other, right. If I want you to fill out a form for me, I send you the form and then you see Jotform there. So that kind of increases the exposure to the brand and people go and create their own free form. And this actually became more explosive because we had a free product. Right. So free product used by also people also has some viral tip meant that people were kind of using this freely and sharing with each other. And then more people were coming because it has some virality and they were also using this product and then they were like, kind of expanding, you know, exponentially. So that I think those two things are the reason for our growth. And, you know, we also cared about SEO, you know, always. Like, even when I was starting out, I had a blog. I continue to blog even today. Like, I continue to blog. I write for Forbes and, you know, Entrepreneur magazine and just wrote, Wrote a book and know, still writing, guest posting on many places, doing podcasts like we do today. So I believe in, like, just going out there and, you know, sharing my experiences, share my. What I learned with others. That. That also helps. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's. It's 18 years, so it's, you know, it's. It's taken a while, but I enjoyed the journey. Like, I think the journey is important. You know, I, I enjoyed it as much when we were like 5% team or 50%. And today, like, we are. We are like 600 employees. And I still enjoy, Enjoy it because, you know, I, I kind of deal with different things on different times. But yeah.

So we've got some so organic growth. Yeah. And so the free gives people a chance to try five forms, for example, and 100 monthly submissions, and then they can upgrade once they've seen it, working it again. I, I applaud you for the dedication and perseverance. And also, as you say, you've contributed as a thought leader as well. What would be one mistake that you'd share without trying to embarrass you, Something that you've learned on the way that you would suggest people don't try themselves?

Yeah, I mean, so a mistake I made was kind of. I don't really understand that free was so important. Just at some point our team is actually coming up with ideas and they said, okay, let's reduce these limits, right? And our team actually. And in some cases we reduce our limits. Like for example, payment forms are really important. A chat form like we have every year, billions of dollars are processed or jotform. We have integrations with over 50 payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe Square. And so, you know, we had this free version that was like 10, you know, you could, you could get like 10 payments per month. And then we decided, okay, hey, people are getting paid, right? They can pay for the, you know, paid version. They, you know, let's reduce the limit for the free version, right? We reduced that to three. And it was actually very successful in the beginning, right? We saw that people were upgrading more, we got more upgrades and you know, it was going well. And. But a year later when we were actually like kind of checking out our dashboards, one of the things we discovered was our payment forms. The growth of our payment forms actually stopped. Instead of going up and up and up, it actually, it was actually going straight. Like it wasn't growing anymore. So the number of NIV payment users were actually the same as the number of people who were churning out. And then that resulted in a straight line. And then when we looked at when that started, it was exactly the time that we actually reduced the limits. So if you, you know, I always believe in the free because free is a great marketing strategy and it gets people to try your product and get people to trust your product because once they try your product and if your product is good, they are going to keep using your product. So it's. And then they're going to upgrade at some point, right? But if we, when we actually kind of lost, we lost our way. When we forgot about that and we reduced the limits there, we discovered that, hey, we actually reduced growth.

Yeah, really interesting. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. So free created an on ramp, didn't it really, as the funnel. And then it sounds like when you reduce that, you actually sort of constricted the, the width of the funnel there. Iterkin Tank over there in Ankara, Turkey. You're also someone who has built an amazing business over 25 years. What would be your. If you like your one piece of advice for fellow entrepreneurs, I have a.

Rule that I called 5050 rule. So you should be spending half of your time with your product and half of your time with growth. And I always believe in this because if you have a product that, if you have a product that's not good, you can spend your time, you can be really good at marketing, you can be really good at sales. You're gonna bring lots of people to try your product, but they're going to try your product and they are gonna just leave it, leave away. They're gonna leave bad reviews about your product. They're not gonna, you know, refer it to other people. They're not gonna talk about it. And you will not have, like, you just constantly, it's a leak bucket. You constantly bring in more traffic, but then they are just leaking out, right? So if your product is lacking, you know, it doesn't matter how much, how good you are at marketing on the reverse side, if you are, if you have a great product, but if you don't spend your time growing your product, if you don't spend your time marketing, what's happening is that nobody is discouraged. So you are kind of, you're going to run out of money, you're going to run out of business. And the other thing is like, you cannot have a great product without users because it's a feedback cycle. You have a product and you can believe that you have the best product in the world, but unless also people are using it, you don't know if it's real. And when people start using it, you're going to discover that it's failing everywhere. It just has so many problems. And then you get that feedback, you fix it, and you get additional feedback. You fix it. Like every time a user encounters your product, they're going to discover new problems. And the problems you fix may go away, but they are going to discover new problems and they're going to suggest new features, right? So it's a feedback cycle. And if you can do them both at the same time, then you can actually go much faster. But it doesn't mean that you always have to have 50, 50. Like, you don't have to do this every day or every week or every month. Sometimes you will discover that, okay, I have a good product. People are coming to my website, they are signing up and they are using my product and then they stick. So I have a good product, but I'm only getting like 10 signups a month. So nobody is actually coming, right? So in those cases, you Kind of have to say, okay, this year I'm going to focus this six months, maybe I'm going to focus on growth, I'm going to focus on marketing. So. And then you have to, once you reach a balance where you know, okay, this is good, I'm getting growth, I'm getting, I'm getting people to use my product and my product is good, then you can actually keep that balance.

Right?

And even today I follow that advice myself. Like, just, I am focused on like, half of my time is focused on JotForm AI, our new AI products, and half of my time is focused on our enterprise growth. So because we have in this SaaS service product, but people were coming like these big companies were coming to us telling us like, hey, sell your product. And then I was saying we don't have a salesperson. And then they were saying they were going to a competitor, right? So we built this enterprise product, we started the sales team, but we need to work on the growth of that product. Right? So I'm focused on that half of my time.

Okay.

And I'm still seeing myself as a startup founder. That's why I'm just leaving everything else to my executives. Like, I have a good executive team, I have a good coo, chief operations officer who is just taking care of all this stuff that I'm able to focus on these important things even today.

Isaac. And thank you for that description of really how you're managing to deal with both product development and customer engagement. As if you like what we might say, the yin and the yang, but continuous cycle of time and energy. As the CEO, could you share a book or a podcast that you have found useful as well? Because then we'll ask you how people get hold of you.

My favorite book is Creative Selection. It's Ken Koi Santa. Hopefully I'm not saying the name incorrectly, but Creative Selection is a book about Apple. And he was actually working as an engineer for Apple for a long time. He worked co closely with Steve Jobs. And I learned so much from that book. And I applied them to, to my company, to my business, to my product and all those lessons. And it's a great book. It's a very like tactical book that teaches you kind of how Apple does these things. And if you see yourself as like, I see Apple and Steve just as my idols because, because of the great products they have created and they are still creating. And that's why I'm kind of trying to learn from them. So that's a great book. And recently my favorite podcast Is marketing Against the grain. This is actually made by. And you know I'm a CEO, right? I'm a founder and CEO. I'm not a marketing person. But this book is not just marketing. They talk about AI a lot. So that's why one of the reasons I love. And they are not just looking at marketing, they're just looking at whole growth marketing like just, you know, great products and. And this podcast is made by the CMO of HubSpot and the CMO of Zapier. He actually has moved to HubSpot as well. But yeah, it's a great podcast about marketing.

Brilliant. Against the grain. Let's look at that one. Isakin Tank if you want to get hold of you. Where can they go?

I have a website, itecintank.com my first name, last name.com and in this website I feature all the, all my writings like because I write in so many places like Forbes Entrepreneur like you can just find them in a single place. But most importantly, the first chapter of my book is available for free in my website. So you can just go there and read the first chapter if you like it, you know you can get it or Amazon or you know on. On a bookstore. Yeah. Itecontank.com and that's a Y T E.

K I N and then Tank T A N K with some very, very nice fonts selected there I can Tank. When I got the email through from your team about coming on the show I couldn't believe it because Jotform is so famous. You know you are part of the landscape and hearing your story to have here. We really how you've helped to grow the landscape as well for automation. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your vision, your story, your perseverance. Been amazing. Thank you so much.

Thank you Jim.

So we've been listening to Eitan Tank and I will of course share his details in the show notes and I think many, many takeaways because it's been a very sort of rich conversation. But this idea that we need to spend time on automation I think for me is the big takeaway because I've thought of automation almost like a side thought that I do on the weekends and on the evenings. But the conversation with Eitakin really demonstrates that automation is fundamental to this growth of the business and Jotform provides a number of tools that we can use to help us to do that. If you've enjoyed this show, do please leave a review and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. Because I don't want anyone to be left behind. And until we meet again, my name's Jim James. Thank you so much for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur.