Is this form-builder worth continuing?
I have been working on a project off and on for the past year or so. I still have not quite come up with my "elevator pitch" but essentially it allows you to create custom forms to store essentially any input type - text, numbers, images, dates, etc. The entries from this form can then be used to create reports, send notifications, build custom "views" to display the data and.....? I am still working on fleshing the features out, but I have the core app working.
I got the idea to work on this when handling a problem at my full time job. We have a certain type of equipment that is extremely important to track and requires some specific data to be tracked along with it. There are not many existing options to do so, and none at all that fit in very well with other systems. Over the years, it has been tracked in spreadsheets, Access databases, and so on but none were great and required a lot of upkeep. They eventually reverted to keeping paper copies of the records that ( of course) fell to the wayside. So I created a simple web app to track this. The users started asking for more fields or changes to field, so I added the ability for them to do this themselves. Then they wanted reports ( and eventually changes to existing reports) so I created a simple drag and drop report builder.
I think this has potential, but it needs a lot of "cleanup" before it is ready to be shown to anyone and I also think it is lacking some features to make it useful. The closest comparisions to it would be a streamlined version of Quickbase or AppSheet but more focused on just creating forms to track specific data rather than create full-blown apps.
Some features I am considering:
Any integrations that might be useful: Google Sheets, Zapier, etc
Share forms between users ( teams)
Public facing forms to allow user's to send the forms to their customer's
I know it is hard to say without seeing it, but is this something that you would use? Is it worth fleshing out?
In similar space creating form builder at https://hashforms.com but it's more of complex formula based forms
I think it is worthwhile to pursue this idea.
When looking for form builders, I was looking for the following:
Found a company that did almost all of this, but they were not ready to make additional changes.
I agree with @sammydigits, get the basics going. You can keep adding features.
Good luck!
If you are open to suggestions, check this project https://codecanyon.net/item/easy-forms-advanced-form-builder-and-manager/14176957
Click around the demo and maybe find some ideas, check workflow, figure out functions...
Nice idea congratulation, did you have some users ? do you have a clear idea where you can acquire first 10 users ?
It is used by quite a lot of people at my work, but I don't have any users outside of that. It is somewhat of a unique situation, since I created it and work on it exclusively on my own but let my employer use it for "free". I am able to get some pretty good feedback about in a real-world scenario, but I am very careful to only work on it on my own time.
I believe that my target customers would be similar to those who could make use of something like airtable, appsheet, quickbase, maybe even salesforce(?). I would like to live in that space where I can target business' that can't quite justify QuickBase, but still have lots of data they need to track with no perfect solution to do so. Anyone making use of Access or spreadsheets would probably fall into this category.
Yes, keep going! But don't consider things like integrations or teams yet, just get the basic product out there first, ship it, and go from there. I've seen form builders listed here that make tons of money :)
Thank you! I have had the basics built and working, but I keep second-guessing the stack I am using so I have rebuilt it several times. I finally decided to just pick what I know I can use and get it released.