Founder's Story - 20+ Million Users Strong: Bootstrapped Journey of Aytekin Tank Founder of JotForm and Its AI Agent Evolution | S2 Ep. 157

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

In this episode of Founders Story, we sit down with Aytekin Tank, the entrepreneur behind the popular online form builder JotForm. Aytekin shares his journey from discovering a key market gap nearly two decades ago—when online forms were a major hassle—to building a thriving, bootstrapped SaaS company serving over twenty-five million users worldwide. He offers invaluable lessons on patience, customer-centric development, and how continuous innovation around customer needs led to JotForm’s robust ecosystem of workflow tools. Finally, Aytekin gives us an exciting preview of JotForm’s newest leap into the future: AI agents that will transform how businesses interact with customers, gather data, and handle tasks autonomously around the clock.Key Topics Discussed:The Entrepreneurial Spark:Aytekin’s early inspiration from building open-source tools in college.Realizing the thrill of seeing people use his creations.How the dot-com era and working full-time at a media company exposed him to the critical need for easy-to-build online forms.Founding JotForm:The core problem: Web editors needed custom forms—no easy tool existed.The decision to bootstrap the business rather than seek investment.Transitioning from a free product to a paid offering and the validation that came from the first paying customers.Slow, Steady Growth and Scaling:Understanding that success in SaaS often doesn’t happen overnight.How JotForm grew very slowly for the first five years (one new hire per year).Maintaining patience, listening to user feedback, and evolving the product based on actual customer needs.Expanding Beyond Forms:Recognizing that forms are just the first step in countless business processes.Developing additional features and products: e-signatures, document generation, workflow approvals, and integration with other tools.Constant user research and interviews lead to a comprehensive suite of productivity solutions.AI Agents – The Next Frontier:JotForm’s ambitious move into AI, starting from a small in-house team to a dedicated staff of over a hundred working on AI Agents.How AI Agents differ from chatbots—agents take action on behalf of users, handle tasks autonomously, and learn from feedback.Envisioning a future where businesses (large and small) and individuals deploy AI Agents to handle customer inquiries, sales, support, and more—even while the owners sleep.The February 2025 release of JotForm AI Agents and the potential it holds for revolutionizing business operations.Empowering Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses:How AI Agents can level the playing field for small businesses and solo founders.The possibility of building highly efficient, large-scale ventures with minimal human staff by leveraging AI-driven processes.How to Get Involved:Learn more and join the waitlist for JotForm AI Agents at jotform.com/ai.Visit AytekinTank.com to connect, read the first chapter of his book, or try out his personal AI agent.Resources & Links:JotForm Website: https://www.jotform.com/JotForm AI Waitlist: https://www.jotform.com/aiAytekin Tank’s Website & Book: https://aytekintank.com/Takeaways:Bootstrapping requires patience, a keen ear for customer feedback, and the willingness to evolve.True growth often comes from understanding the “why” behind user actions and expanding your product suite accordingly.AI and agentic technology stand poised to dramatically streamline how businesses operate, fostering round-the-clock customer engagement and support.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com* Check out Vanta and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://www.vanta.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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BedMGM.com for terms and conditions must be 19 years of age or older to wager Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact Conox Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have a very special guest and I can't wait to dive in but Aiteken Tonk is the founder and CEO of a company I'm sure everyone that watches this either has used or is currently using but you are the founder and CEO of JotForm like who has not used JotForm? Everyone has has read I think everyone I know has had some sort of experience but I can't wait to dive in with you though around what you're doing with AI and how how you see a gentic AI many experts

have told me it is the future it is the absolute future and we really need to understand how we're gonna use it leverage it what you have going on let's first go back in time even even before JotForm. What made you say, I wanna be an entrepreneur? I guess when I was a student, when I was in college, like I made this product for our like student organization and like this product was allowing people to like, I was also

making the website for the organization and I was like this you know it was actually allowing people to create these you know create their accounts like create their profiles. So it started as an open source product that I released it to the world and that actually is like the first time I kind of experienced seeing people using my product and that was really exciting like just I love to see people using my product and and people actually started like it was a free product, but people started sending me checks to You know make changes on it like just you know

Customize it for them or something and that like that really triggered that Entrepreneurship mindset, but I had no like confidence in myself So I found a full-time job like I graduated college. I found a full-time job in New York, working for this media company. I worked there for five years, but during this time, I continued to develop my products and learn from that. But what really helped me go full-time and start my own business. JotForm, that's like two decades ago, lost to, seeing how our editors needed forms all the time. They were constantly asking me to create forms for them. I was a programmer.

And after the dot com bubble busted, our team was actually very small. We went from 20 people to five people and they needed all kinds of forms like payment forms, compact forms, questionnaire, surveys. They were running contests, they needed forms for that. So I saw the need and I saw that there was no product that could actually and actually my initial thought was like if I can't if I can find a product that could take this away from me That I didn't have to do it. So like I searched for the product I did my market research and I couldn't find a good product like that was a survey Mikey, but that could only do like surveys good product like that was a survey Mikey but that could only do like surveys so that's when I knew that this is a good market like because there's a

big need and people are going online people need forms online so you know I quit my job and started job form that you know I released job form in 2006 that's almost two decades ago. It's amazing. You know, there's a problem. You want to solve the problem. You did some market research, right? You didn't have to go hire a market research company. You figured out this is something that could be.

And you knew that based on the people that you around the job that you had before is where you found the problem. I'm a huge proponent around keeping a job until you get to a certain point where you can quit and go all in on the business. That's an experience that I've had. I think that's going to inspire a lot of people who also are entrepreneurs where they want to solve this problem. So let's fast forward to when you started getting traction. How did you know that okay I quit my job I'm going all in I'm making JotForm I'm starting to see some

success. Was there like a tipping point where you said you know what this is going to be massive? I will say like in the beginning I released it as a free product because I wanted to see, I wanted to actually test it, like if people really needed this, if there was a need and like how can I get feedback from users. So, and I released it completely free February 2006 and then people actually started signing up using the product. I had this public forum as my support and I was the only support person. People ask all these questions. They would report bugs, they would request features.

And my answer was like, it's done, it's ready. Just like a couple of hours later, I would do whatever they needed, just respond back to them and I completed that. And that kind of gave me the idea that this is really going to work. But the first year, it was all free. And the second year, like 2007, I decided, OK, let's release a premium version. I hired my first employee, like we worked on the premium paid version for a while. We added some features, some cool features,

and we added some limits to the free version. And then, you know, when we released that, that was like 2007 March. Like, so far we had like 15,000 users. and then I was able to get like 500 of them upgraded to the paid version. It was only like nine dollars per month but that was still... I knew that if I can get like 500 customers, that's the point that I knew that this is a business, That's the point that I knew that this is a business. This is going to be a reliable business. It's going to be a successful business.

I didn't know how big it would be. Just to give you one example, I created this document and the title was, How to Get to 1 Million Users. And I wrote as a subtitle, I know that we'll probably never get to one million users, but this is like a brain exercise, like just a brainstorming exercise. And years later, I was just searching for something else. And we already had millions of users,

and then I found this document. And then I was like, wow, and then I found this document and then I was like wow I Remember right in this document and there was a list of like 30 different things that we should be doing and we actually tried pretty much all of them and Most of them actually didn't work, but there were some that really worked So so that was a surprise for me. So So that was a surprise for me. So that actually tells me that I never was sure how big we could get.

So today we have 25 million users. We have like 700 employees, offices around the world in seven different cities. So we got pretty big comparing to that earlier days. Like, the first five years, the first year I'm like you know I started my staff I had my first employee second year like I had my second employee so the first five years like we were just growing one employee per year just we were at like five employees at the fifth year and that's how slow the growth was at the beginning

and I think in many sales businesses that's the slow the growth was at the beginning. And I think in many SaaS businesses, that's the case, because especially if you're bootstrapping, you don't have funds to hire more people, you go much more slowly. But the great thing is like you have the independence, you have the freedom to kind of choose your own path and take long vacations if you would like, you know, we just it's less stressful and so and you know when I mentor startups like most of the time like, you know, they are saying like

Hey, look look at us like, you know, we are not growing and I compare them to very we're like Hey, you are in third year, you know, you already have like five employees. You have this many users I was actually I wasn't that big that back down like when I was on my third year so it's just I think it's about patience and persistence especially in a bootstrap businesses and if you can have that if you can keep that focus on your product if you can if you continue to listen to your customers, because they tell you what you should be working on, they tell you what they need. And we always had that focus. Like, it's like, it's going to be like 19 years now. And that's always number one priority, like, you know,

what the users need and what kind of feedback they give us. And then we just follow that feedback and they show us the path. And I think that's one of the great things about bootstrapping, because you don't have these investors that you need to ask for or build features for them or their ideas. You have your customers to ask for. And they pay you by their hard-earned cash

to tell you what you should be working on. And that's much more valuable than anybody else. Wow. I mean, what an incredible story where you continued even at the five-year mark going very slow, and then you hit this tipping point and you had millions of users. Your first few hundred people were paying you you and you really knew you were onto something. I think that's really great around this bootstrap mentality.

I think a lot of SaaS, at least founders that we've had or people I've spoken to, because they had to raise money, they were really forced to look at how fast they can exit or how fast they can do some sort of liquidity event because they have to give back to these people who have given them money, which makes total sense, but if you bootstrap, you can slowly get there and sometimes it's not an overnight success that we need. It's the things that will be successful will take time. I didn't realize that you had been starting this almost two decades ago. And so how has that been continuing on with JotForm? How do you keep the excitement

going as the founder and CEO for yourself? How do you reinvent things or how do you look at things in terms of this obvious long-term vision and long-term mission that you have. In the old days I assumed that what we were doing was like we were just helping people create forms and just HTML forms. Most people actually embedded them on their website so I was just thinking hey we are this you know we just help them create these forms like and put them on their websites. But over the years, we discovered that people weren't just creating forms, just to put their website or just to create forms.

People don't fill out forms just to fill out forms. There is actually a reason they fill out forms. You're registering for something, you are applying for something, you are giving feedback about some product, you are buying a product, maybe making a purchase. There's just so many reasons that you fill out forms. And so we have a saying in a chat form that every journey starts with a form. Basically it's about like you know there is all these like different business processes there's always this you know workflows that are actually handled by forms and the forms are just the first step

and people don't stop at form like you know people create forms their users fill out those forms and then something else happens. Maybe they need to ship an order, maybe it's a lead form and then someone is interested for an event and that needs to be tracked and like just emails needs to be sent. Maybe e-signatures need to be signed. Like there is just like so many things that might happen after the form. So when we actually started looking at our job that way, then we said okay so in that case we are just like if you think about this as a puzzle, we are just giving them the first piece. And then they have that piece, and maybe

they're handling the rest of the journey manually trying to do things, or maybe they are using different products. So what if they actually discover what else they do after they, after people fill out these forms, right? So that's what we started to research. We have user researchers who will just interview our customers all day long and then they will write reports. Sometimes I just watch those interviews as well and I learn so much from them. Basically, we discovered that they need approvals, they need auto-generated emails, they need like, you know, e-signatures, they need to create documents. So this actually made me more excited because I didn't want to build this forms product all my life, right? Like I wanted to build other products. So this actually gave me the opportunity to build all those additional products as well.

Like, you know, an e-signature product, a workflow approach product, document generation like PDF generation product and like we built this air table like you know table spreadsheet product as well like so reporting tools so we built all these different kind of tools and also recently since we have been looking at our job as like, you know, just getting people to automate whatever they are trying to do with the forms, like we started looking into like how we can use AI just to be able to get this automated as well. Like how can we use AI? So maybe even not just like the additional pieces,

maybe how can we replace forms with AI, right? So that was the idea that like one and a half years ago, I had like some engineers at JotFunk who had been doing AI previously to kind of catch these bad guys like fishers, spammers. They were using machine learning. So we had some in-house knowledge about AI. So we started this project.

We started working on this project together. And today, that team of three people actually turned into like 120 people are actually working on this project right now. And we are going to release that in February. Basically, what we are doing is we are just replacing our product with an AI product. And we call that job from AI agents.

Basically, instead of sending someone, let's say, an event registration form, you could just give them this AI. You could give it in different ways. You could give them a chatbot. You could embed a chatbot in your website. You can just give them a phone number, and they can just call and fill out the form by just talking to an AI and telling it,

not just filling out the form, but actually getting the question of the answer as well. So this actually allows us to replace more and more of the things, not just the forms, but also being able to provide customer support, maybe do sales, all the things that can be done with an AI agent. And it's very exciting.

Just the capabilities of AI is incredible. So we have been working on that recently. Wow, I took away a lot from that. It's really interesting how you've mastered one product and service, and then you have all these customers who then need more things. So you add in more products and services to fulfill the needs of those people. And then now with AI, I mean, to start from that small team to 120 plus people,

this obviously must be something critically important that you see for the future. I've heard from a lot of people that agentic AI could be like one of the most game-changing things That will happen to us in terms of from like a business perspective How do you see a agentic AI and how that's gonna be changing? You know our daily lives and for from the perspective of an entrepreneur So when people say AI agents or agentic, they might mean

different things, but the basic idea is that like the difference between chat bots and AI agent is like a chat bot is like you talk to it, you ask a question, you get an answer, right? But with an AI agent, it's actually doing things for you. Like it's just like you tell it, okay, this is your job, and it goes out to the world and does it for you. Like if you need a research, like that's like it researches something for you, maybe reports you. Maybe, you know, you have an AI agent that actually does like, you know, you know, browsers the social media, browses like the news, and then just returns back to you

with the information you need about the world. Or in our case, maybe, you know, maybe you use jobs from AI agents, which is gonna be released in February to 2025, and you just give it to, give it a job, and then it can talk on your behalf to other people and get things done for you. So my vision for this AI agency is here. You're a startup founder. Finding product market fit is probably your number one priority, but to land bigger customers you also need security compliance

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Like this. I imagine a world where, you know, every organization, every business, even every person actually has like this AI agent that represent them. So let's say in the middle of the night, you're gonna send your kids to a summer school, summer camp, and then you have a question in your mind, like you cannot just call them in the middle of the night, you cannot ask a question. But if you knew that they had an AI agent, even in the middle of the night, you could just talk to the AI agent and ask your questions and get them answered. And if you need

to purchase something additional or something, you could just do it right away, right there, in the 3 a.m. in the morning. Or like, and the great thing is like the owner of that small business is actually sleeping on their bed comfortably. And you know, they're making sales, they are answering questions without worrying about them. And the good thing is how we are building this agency is like, we have some human in the loop. Like we the loop. You can actually see all the conversations. You can give feedback to your AI agents. You can even see live conversations happening.

And then if you see any issues, you can join those conversations. And we have better users. And sometimes people will just see their agents. And then they will, if it makes a mistake, you know, they can just quickly connect to the person and just like correct them as well. So this actually like AI is not like 100% just and and the great thing is like people are used to that. People expect the AI to make mistakes and they're used to it like because you know anybody who uses AI knows that it's not gonna be 100% but you know most of the time humans are not

100% either like we are we make all these mistakes like if we are if we lose if it didn't slip last night like we will we will say wrong things as well like we will make mistakes or if you have a junior employee they're gonna give like the wrong answers to the customers. And people expect AI to make mistakes as well. So people are very understanding. And the great thing is, actually, people love talking to AI.

So for example, if you're talking to a human being, you don't want to be rude. You don't want to ask too many questions. You don't want to be rude. You don't want to ask too many questions. You don't want to repeat your questions multiple times if they don't get it. At some point you give up and just say okay. But with AI, people are much more patient because they know they're not going to hurt their feelings like the other person. They're not embarrassed about the questions they're asking. They're much more comfortable. And if they don't get the answer, they ask again. So it's actually people don't have any problems. And chat-shift

has been odd for a while now, and people are now used to talking to AI. Many people are used to it and they kind of understand how to ask their questions. They kind of know if they don't get the answer, they need to ask it in a different way. So it's actually pretty good. I wasn't expecting this much success from AI. I was expecting it to fail too much. And it's still failing. And we are just like, our beta users give us permission to watch all those conversations as well, listen to the conversations or read the conversations. And we have three

people, all day long, they just review all those better conversations, better users. And then they're just marking all these errors. And then the engineers are fixing those problems. And it's just a way for us to develop this. And even in February when we released it, it's not going to be perfect. But people are OK with not being imperfect. There are some cases where people are not okay with that,

but except that like most, usually people who are like small businesses use JotForm a lot. And a small business owner, instead of not being able to answer in a customer or just being too busy and not being able to return to them. They would prefer an AI to handle all these issues like sales and customer support issues. So it's pretty exciting.

I think from a business perspective, having these AI agents, this might be the most exciting time to be in business in our lifetimes. And I can't wait just to see how transformative this is going to be for, you know, those solo entrepreneurs, like you said, the people that are bootstrapping that can't hire a bunch of people, you know, even the companies that, you know, maybe mom and pop shops or, you know, these these businesses that don't always have the ability to have these resources can now do that and compete at even a bigger level. And I can't wait to see how these other SaaS founders, you know, how they can grow their companies as like a single person. single person. We keep hearing about like, when is there going to be the single business owner who all they have are AI agents and they create a billion dollar company? Who knows if that'll ever happen? But I'm really excited for what you've been able to do and what you have coming on with the AI agents in February of 2025. I can't wait to be able to test this out and try it and I'm with you. I think People are going to embrace this technology And it's gonna make our lives much easier. So if you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information

How can they do so? So I have a website like my first namelastname.com, itekintank.com. You can talk to my AI agent, itekinai, if you go to my website and try the AI agent's product that way as well. Also with the AI agents, jazform.com slash AI, you could go there and you could enter the wait list and sometimes, you know, we still, you know, the waitlist. And sometimes, we still give early access. You don't have to wait until February in some cases. And yeah, I have a book.

You can read the first chapter of my book on my website. And there is a contact form. You could use that, or you could just talk to my AI. And send me your message that way, and it can take notes notes so that's a great way to be able to communicate with people through an AI agent. I love that we're having like a personal conversation with people that we normally would probably never get to help a conversation with on what feels like a personal level. In the future you and I might be having this conversation as AI agents, but I don't know. I feel like I would

miss out on doing the interviews, but who knows, right? Maybe I can replicate myself and do 5,000 interviews versus, you know, a few, but this has been great. I hope everyone checks it out. Can't wait till February, but make sure that you sign up now because if it can be released beforehand, and that's very exciting. This is a super exciting time. And thank you so much for all that you've done and all the inspiration and impact that you've made

over the last few decades. It's absolutely incredible. I'm fired up. Like I can't wait to use these AI agents and see how this can really level up my business. But thank you so much for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thank you, Dan, for having me on your show. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long.

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