How I Got the Idea of Building PaymentForm.io

Our first SaaS product PaymentForm.io is released on 4 days ago. I decided to share how I got the idea of building it. It didn’t start with a business plan or a market research doc. It started with three moments I personally witnessed, each one a little frustrating, each one oddly familiar.

The donations nobody could verify

August 2024. Feni, Bangladesh floods. My brother and his university friends were collecting donations to help affected families, sharing a personal wallet number on Facebook and asking people to send money directly.

I asked how they’d track the total. The answer wasn’t clear.

If $100 came into one person’s wallet, nobody else could verify that number. His personal balance was sitting right there alongside it. Even with the best intentions, that creates room for doubt.

A simple payment form would’ve fixed it. Donors enter their name, pay, and every transaction gets logged automatically. Everyone on the team sees the same numbers in real time.

The seller drowning in messages

A relative of mine sells bags through social media. Limited stock, like 20 to 30 pieces. No website, doesn’t want one. Her whole setup is a boosted Facebook post.

When a post does well, 100+ messages pour in. Some people pay, some don’t, some pay late. Payments keep coming in after stock runs out, so she ends up issuing refunds. On top of that she’s manually collecting addresses through back and forth DMs.

A payment form would let customers submit everything in one shot. When stock hits zero, orders stop automatically. No over-ordering, no refunds, no message chaos.

The WhatsApp group that became unusable

I’m in a group with 100+ tech founders. Someone organized a meetup with a registration fee and collected through a personal wallet, with everyone posting payment screenshots as proof.

Around 50 people registered. Some paid on behalf of two or three others. The organizer had to manually piece it all together from screenshots. Meanwhile the group was buried under notifications and I kept getting pinged for no reason.

A payment form would’ve handled everything automatically. No screenshots, no manual work, no noise.

The pattern was hard to ignore

Three different situations, same root problem. No structure around the payment, no shared record, no visibility, too much manual back and forth.

I kept thinking: why isn’t there something simple for this? There should be a system where all transactions and information live in a central place that can be shared with a team or colleagues. Not a full eCommerce platform, not a website builder. Just a page where you explain what you’re collecting for, connect a payment gateway, and share the link.

That question became PaymentForm.io.

One last thing

These experiences happened in Bangladesh, but the problem is not unique to here. Teachers collecting fees, sellers managing orders, organizers tracking registrations, this happens everywhere. That’s why from day one we built PaymentForm.io for a global audience. If you look at our payment gateway integrations, Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Razorpay, and more on the way like Square, Mercado Pago and Paystack, you’ll notice a pattern. We’re trying to cover as many countries as possible, because the same frustration I witnessed here is being felt by someone right now in different parts of the world.