FlexyForm
Contact form backend as service
I'm very glad to cross the 100 users milestone on FlexyForm.com.
Although no one has converted to a paying user. I am really happy to see my side project being useful to people as the are 30 active accounts (Users who have had form submissions) in the last month. I hope it will continue to grow this way
This weekend FlexyForm.coom have been featured on nocodelist.co.
I am trying to market the service as a low code/no code tool.
The NoCode/LowCode scene seems to be very active theses last months with new tools poping everyday.
I will continue to look for new ways to make FlexyForm work well with other tools in the ecosystem.
Some of our first users seem to have some trouble with spam submissions. At first we added just a honeypot field which had to remain empty. But It is just a simple bot spam protection.
So we added full support for google reCaptcha with opt-in and just 3 lines of code to add for a traditional form
It's also available for all plans, including the free tier.
I just published my second use case article on the form of a tutorial showcasing how to create a landing page with a contact form with Gridsome (a static form generator based on vue) and FlexyForm on dev.to
https://dev.to/nh2_amine/adding-a-contact-form-to-a-gridsome-static-website-using-flexyform-3o7e
I just published a use case article on the form of a tutorial showcasing how to create a landing page with a contact form with Gatsby.js (a static form builder) and FlexyForm on dev.to
https://dev.to/nh2_amine/adding-a-contact-form-to-a-gatsby-js-landing-page-using-flexyform-3bn9
Today I finally find the courage to write down and publish an article describing the process thant lead me to create FlexyForm.
I decided to publish it on Medium. Here's the link
https://medium.com/@nh293/i-created-and-published-my-first-saas-heres-the-story-7b4f99f875ff
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Congrats Amine!! Keep it up!
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That's awesome, also congrats on your first SAAS!
Flexyform looks a great idea. It's amazing how many people ask me about forms, I'll bookmark flexyform and send them your way from now on ;)
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Thank you! And thanks for the support :)
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Nice! Congrats on publishing the article!
You might want to add another link to FlexyForm in the very beginning of the article to help with SEO and it'll probably get more people to click through to your website too.
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Thank you!
Regarding the adding another link early on the article.
To be honest with you I hesitated to put the link in the first place as I really just wanted to share the Journey rather than the final product!
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Good read Amine! Best of luck with FlexyForm. I hope you blog more about your progress. Looking forward to reading more about it!
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Congrats! Now keep going! Find people who want / need your service and start talking to them about it!
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Thanks! That's the most difficult part
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Today I added a much needed feature of handling file uploads.
It's added to every pricing plan including the free tier but with no storage.
Also to protect our user from (simple) bot spamming. We added a honey-pot field handling which should always be empty for a submission to be handled.
In less than a week, https://flexyform.com got featured on SaaSHub (https://www.saashub.com/flexyform-alternatives), BetaList (https://betalist.com/startups/flexyform)
This got us our first free tier users (7 as of today).
It doesn't seem that we are having bugs so far :) \o/
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Congrats! SaaSHub is really cool, and has been giving us some good exposure when people compare our competitors.
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Thanks for the mention of SaaSHub @nh2_amine!
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I was just browsing on SaaSHub and found that you guys did a status page for all(?) product listed on your website?
That's really cool!
https://www.saashub.com/howuku-status
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Looks great!
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That's great. How did you get featured? I've been signed up for a while but doesn't get to much traffic so far. Was thinking of paying to be featured, if this what you did and do you see much traffic/signups from saashub to make it worth it.
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Congrats! I know with some of these services you either get put in a long waitlist or have to pay to get listed immediately. Which route did you take?
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As I am just starting out. I chose the long waitlist which was not that long after all :)
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Congrats! Are the free tier users happy with the service? How much are they using it?
Also, have you got any paying users yet? Are you making any marketing/sales efforts?
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All the acquired users are free tier users. And they seem to be using it for testing purposes for now. They create a testing form endpoint and try 1 or 2 submissions on their own.
Regarding sales/marketing, this is the pain point form me. I try to be active on forums/reddits and try post replies when it's suitable and try not to be spammy about it.
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Nice! Did you notice bigger traffic from these sources so far?
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As of today they are my main sources of traffic with indiehackers. But the traffic is pretty lowI must confess, It's been around 10-15 unique visitors per day.
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Maybe you would like to try my tool - https://owwly.com in your free time. You can share your product and infinity number of posts about FlexyForm. More interesting posts = more traffic 🔥 Worth to try ;)
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thanks! and very nice tool!
Definetly worth a try
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To make it easy to share the submitted data with other services I added a Zapier integration. Wich is one of the most used noCode/Lowcode tools.
To do that I added the possibility to read the posted data as JSON with an API key and the form key already in use to post the data the normal way.
Right now I have to wait that at least 10 people create Zaps with my integration to be able to make it public.
Today I deployed the website and opened it to the public.
you can check it out here => https://www.flexyform.com
All feedbacks are welcome. There is a free tier to play with.
I think I will have to add some documentation to best describe how it all works.
Now starts the most difficult part for me: marketing!
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I like the simplicity of the product.
Just check the grammar on the landing page.
“Infos” perhaps should be “Info” and I think I saw some other tiny things like that.-
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Thank you i'll redo a full check
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Agreed there are similar products in the market, but that just means there is proven demand for it!
I think now it all comes down to the marketing of your offering.I like your landing page and can understand your product offering.
Is it possible for you to place a live interactive view of how the form looks and works and the results that come from it? I think that will be quite cool.
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Thanks a lot for your feedback ! I'll try to find something to showcase the product
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Nice product but how is it different from its competitor? There is a lot of similar product. I saw one just yesterday on IH. How can you provide something unique?
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Thank you for your input!
I didn't try to build something especially unique.
I found some similar products as well. But I thought I could build one on my own without thinking much about competitionBut I would be very interested to have some ideas to differentiate from others, if it's possible of course
PS: I missed the similar product yesterday. I would be insterested to look at what this looks like
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@nh2_amine It was https://formcaster.co/, you can find them on PH too.
They do allow file submission too. You can add that one, also auto responder feature. There is another that I use https://formspree.io/
I guess the best way to imporve your product is look for all similar products, and add as many feature as possible. I am doing the same :)
Good luck.
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Thank you!
I knew about formspree and thank you for the advice!
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Congratulations on launching!
A few points of design feedback if you're interested:
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On the Landing page:
- the value prop is clear - good job!
- the stock graphics feel overused and generic (I know this is a bummer, because those nice vector graphics of people are free and well-executed ... so they're everywhere now) I honestly think finding some unique graphics would go a long way...
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On the Pricing page:
- the currency symbol was hard to see because of its small size
- the / year subtext on each price was almost invisible due to very low contrast with the background
- the Sign Up CTA for reach tier is identical - what about making the Free tier green w/ white text so that it stands out. That'll get more signups into the top of your sales funnel.
If you're interested in more UI/UX tips, I've got a free mini-course: https://the-ux-mini-course.com ;)
I've got you queued up for a feature on https://thedailystartup.club/ I don't have a huge audience, but I know how hard getting started on marketing feels when you're used to design/development :)
A question if you don't mind: what tech stack did you build FlexyForms on what part of the build was the least fun/most time-consuming?
All the best!
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Wow! Just wow for this feedback! Thank you very much!
I'll try to apply your ideas quickly.Thanks for UX course and for the feature on the daily startup club.
Regarding the stack, I used what i'm most comfortable with (PHP/Symfony/MariaDB) and I used Stripe for the payment/subscription part.
As you could image the UI/UX part is the most time consuming form me as I am more of backend developer
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Glad to help :)
Definitely choose the stack you know and can move fastest in!
I've got a few more questions about your experience with UI/UX as a backend developer. If you're up for a discussion, please shoot me an email (caleb.peterson@cubicle6.com)
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Very good points! And I just checked out your course. Very good info!
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I wish you'd have posted the link here, would've loved to have a look 🙂
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my bad! juste added it ;)
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Thank you! I'll try to find something nice to showcase the product
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1 Comment
hello , any update on your product, are there are any paying customers ? how do you promote it ? have you ever spent a dime on promoting it ? and are you interested into selling your SAAS ?