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Founder's Story
20+ Million Users Strong: Bootstrapped Journey of Aytekin Tank Founder of JotForm and Its AI Agent Evolution | S2 Ep. 157
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- [00:01]
Health Coach
We all need a moment to really breathe. So here's your chance to take a deep breath in. Now give a nice long exhale and repeat another 10 or so times. This healthy suggestion is brought to you by Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. Together we Health. Feeling stiff? Put your hands in the air like you just don't care. Or maybe like you do care. Move your arms behind your back. Do some gentle twists with your core and repeat. This healthy suggestion is brought to you by Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. Together we Health.
- [00:38]
Dan
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have a very special guest and I can't wait to dive in. But it 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, right? 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 you see agentic AI. Many experts have told me it is the future, it is the absolute future. And we really need to understand how we're going to use it, leverage it, what you have going on. Let's first go back in time. Even before Jotform. What made you say I want to be an entrepreneur?
- [01:28]
Aytekin Tank
I guess when I was a student, when I was in college, like I made this product for 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, creative accounts, like creative 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 loved seeing people using my product 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, like I continued to develop my products and learn from that. But what really helped me like really go full time and start my own business like Jotform. That's like two decades ago lost to you Know, like, seeing how our editors needed forms all the time. Like, they, like they were constantly asking me, asking me to create forms for them. I was a programmer and like after the dot com, you know, bubble busted, like, we, our team was actually very small. Like we were, we went from like 20 people to five people. And like just they needed all kinds of forms, like payment forms, contact forms, questionnaires, surveys. Like they were running contests. They needed forms for that. So, like, just I saw the need and I saw that there was no product that could actually. And I actually, my initial thought was like, if I can, if I can find a product that could take this away from me, that I didn't have to do it. So I searched for the product, I did my market research and I couldn't find a good product. Like there was a survey monkey, 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 Jotform that, you know, I released job form in 2006. That's almost two decades ago.
- [04:22]
Dan
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.
- [04:36]
Listener
People that you around.
- [04:37]
Dan
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?
- [05:17]
Aytekin Tank
I would 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, I released it completely free, February 2006. And. 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. And people ask all These questions, like, they would have, you know, they would report bugs, they would request features, and I would. My answer was like, it's done. It's ready. Like, just. Just, like, you know, a couple of hours later, I would, like, do whatever they needed, like, just respond back to them. And I completed that. And that kind of gave me the idea that, like, this is really gonna work. But the first year, it was all free, and the second year, like, 2007, I decided, okay, let's release a premium version. I hired my first employee. Like, we worked on the premium payment paid version for a while. We added some features, some cool features, and we added some limits to the free version. And then when we released that, that was like, 2007, March. 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, $9 per month, but that was still. I knew that if, you know, if I can get, like, 500 customers, that's the point that I knew that this is a business. This is going to be, like, a reliable business. It's going to be 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 1 million users, but this is like a brain exercise, just 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, I remember writing 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 that was a surprise for me. So that actually tells me that I never was sure how big we could get. So today we had 25 million users. We have, like, 700 employees, offices around the world in seven different cities. So we got pretty big comparing to that early days, like, you know, 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 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 paths and take long vacations if you would like. We just, it's less stressful and so, and you know, when I mentored 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 where we were 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 back then, 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 going to be like 19 years now and that's always number one priority. Like you know, what the users need and what, 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 answer or like, you know, build features for them, like, or their ideas. You have your customers to answer, right? And then your, and they pay you by their hard earned cash to tell you like what you should be working on. And that's much more valuable than anybody else.
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Listener
Wow.
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Dan
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 and you really knew you were onto something. I think that's really great around this, this, the 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, 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? Like 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?
- [11:44]
Aytekin Tank
In the early 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 websites. So I was just thinking, hey, we are this, you know, we just helped them create these forms like and put them on their websites. But over the years that we discovered that people weren't just creating forms, you know, just to put it put their website or just to create forms. People don't fill out forms just to fill out forms, right? 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. Like there's just like so many reasons that you fill out forms. And so we have a thing in a chat forum 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 they need to, maybe it's a lead form. And then someone is interested in their product service, they need to get back to them. Someone is registering for an event and that needs to be tracked and 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 we actually discover like what else they do after they like give, you know, after fill out, people fill out these forms, right? So that's what we started to like research like, you know, we have user researches who will just interview our customers, you know, all day long and then they will, you know, they will write reports and sometimes I just watch those interviews as well and I learned so much from them. And basically we discovered that you know, they need approvals, they need like auto generated emails, they need like you know, E signatures, they need to create documents. 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, a pro product, document generation, like PDF generation product. And we built this airtable like table spreadsheet product as well, 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 our AI so that 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 started like I had like some engineers at Just Fork who had been doing AI previously to kind of catch these bad guys, like phishers, 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 like that team of like 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 like we are just replacing our product with an AI product and we called it J from AI agents. Basically instead of sending someone, let's say an event registration form, you could just give them this AI. You know, you could give it in different ways. You could give them a chatbot, you could embed a chat chatbot in your website. You can just give them a phone number and they can just call and like fill out the form by just talking to an AI and you know, telling it like not just like filling out the form but actually getting the question of answers 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.
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Listener
Wow.
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Dan
I took away a lot from that. It's really interesting how you've mastered, you 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 agentic AI and how that's going to be changing, you know, our daily lives and for from the perspective of an entrepreneur.
- [18:19]
Aytekin Tank
So when people say AI agents or agentic, they might mean different things, but the basic idea is that like the difference between chatbots and AI agent is like a chatbot 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, 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, browses 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 J agents, which is going to be released in February 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 agencies.
- [19:29]
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Dan
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- [23:28]
Aytekin Tank
Like this. I imagine a world where, you know, every organization, every business, every, even every person actually has like this AI agent that represent them. So let's say in the middle of the night, you're going to send your kids to a summer school, summer camp or. And then like, you ask, you have a question in your mind, right? Like, you cannot just call them in the middle of tonight, right? You cannot ask a question, right? But if you knew that they had an AI agent, right, even in the middle of the night, like, 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 and right, you know, in 3am 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 are making sales, they are answering questions without worrying about them. And the good thing is how we are building these agencies. Like, we have some human in the loop. Like, we are actually. 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, like, you can join those conversations. And like, you know, 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 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 going to be 100%. But you know, most of the time humans are not under person either. Like, we are, we make all these mistakes. Like if we are, if we lose, if you didn't sleep 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 going to give like the wrong answers to the customers. So it's. And people expect AI to kind of make mistakes as well. So people are very understanding. And the great thing is, like, actually People love talking to AI. So for example, like, if you're talking to a human being right, you don't want to be rude, like, you don't want to ask like too many questions. You don't want to like repeat your questions multiple times. Like, if they don't get it, like at some point, like you give up and like just okay, you just say okay. But with AI, like people are much more patient because they know they're not going to hurt their feelings. Like the other person, there's no, like, they're not embarrassed about the questions they're asking. Like, they're much more comfortable and if they, if they don't get the answer, they, you know, they ask again. And so it's, it's actually people don't have any problems. And like, and ChatGPT has been odds for a while now and people are now used, used to like talking to AI. Like many people are used to it and they kind of understand how to ask their questions. They kind of know, like, if they don't get the answer, like they need to like ask it in a different way. So it's actually pretty good. Like, I wasn't expecting this much success from AI agents. I was expecting it to fail, like too much. And it's still failing. And we are just like, you know, our beta users give us permission to like, like watch all those conversations as well, listen to the conversations or like, you know, read the conversations. And we're like, we have, we have three people. They just, all they do 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 to, for us to develop this. And even in February when we released it, it's not going to be perfect. But people are okay with not being imperfect. There are some cases where people are not okay with that but accept that like, that like most like, you know, usually people who are small businesses use jack form a lot and a small business owner not, you know, instead of not being able to like answering a cost customer or like just like just being too busy and not being able to return to them. Like they actually preferred an AI to handle all these issues like sales and customer support issues. So it's pretty exciting.
- [28:15]
Dan
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 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 $1 billion 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 going to make.
- [29:28]
Listener
Our lives much easier.
- [29:30]
Dan
So if you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information, how can they do so.
- [29:36]
Aytekin Tank
So I have a website, like my first name, last name.comech in tank. Com. You can talk to my AI agent Itech in AI if you go to my website and try the AI agents product that way as well. Also with the AI agents jazform.com AI you could go there and you could enter 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 agents and, you know, send me your message that way and it can take notes. So that's a great way to be able to communicate with people through an AI agent.
- [30:30]
Dan
I love that we're having like a personal conversation with people that we normally would probably never get to have 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. 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 could 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 Founders Story.
- [31:29]
Aytekin Tank
Thank you, Dan for having me on your show.
- [31:41]
Health Coach
Feeling stiff? Put your hands in the air like you just don't care. Or maybe like you do care. Move your arms behind your back, do some gentle twists with your core and repeat. This healthy suggestion is brought to you by Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. Together we health we all need a moment to really breathe, so here's your chance to take a deep breath in. Now give a nice long exhale tail and repeat another 10 or so times. This healthy suggestion is brought to you by Regents Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon. Together we help.