In our latest Q&A session, we’re chatting with Annabel Maw, who is the director of communications at JotForm. Passionate about writing and communications, in 2020, she secured more than 300 media placements, including in prestigious publications like TechCrunch, Fast Company, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, and CMSWire.
Director of Communications at JotForm
Can you please give us a brief overview of JotForm and what it does?
Aytekin Tank created the first WYSIWYG online form builder in 2006. Seven years in, JotForm surpassed 1 million users.
Fast forward to today, and JotForm is a comprehensive online form builder with about 10 million users in over 200 countries, 10,000+ templates, 400+ form widgets, and 100+ integrations with popular software applications. And it’s completely bootstrapped.
Who are JotForm’s customers?
JotForm is used by companies of all sizes, from small businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions to healthcare providers, government agencies, and many Fortune 500 companies.
Some of the companies that use JotForm include Adobe, Red Bull, Pottery Barn, Ford, and Viacom.
What’s JotForm’s core product?
At its core, JotForm is an online form builder and survey maker. Within a few seconds, a non-technical person can create and launch a new form. No coding needed.
Once you’ve created a form, it’s just as easy to collect and manage all of the responses.
Some of our core features include our drag-and-drop form editor, conditional logic, PDF Editor, e-signatures, a mobile app, approval processes, workflows (more on that later in this post), and the ability to accept payment quickly and securely from any form.
What are some of the most popular use cases?
As we alluded to earlier, businesses of all sizes and across all industries use JotForm. Here’s just a handful of the diverse industries that are using JotForm to create a wide variety of forms and surveys:
- Healthcare
- Human resources
- Finance
- Information technology
- Nonprofits
- Education
- Summer camps
- Churches
- Salons
- Photographers
- Veterinarians
- Restaurants and food trucks
Use cases range from registration, membership, and payment forms to feedback forms and surveys.
In addition to similar tools, like Trello and Slack, we also have a ton of prosumers using our software. They started using it for work and realized they could also use it at home and for their hobbies.
For example, we see customers using JotForm to organize community service and volunteering events, birthday party RSVP forms, and even as an all-in-one wedding planning tool. That’s right. You can plan (almost) your entire wedding using JotForm, from capturing guest RSVPs and dinner choices to addresses and even song requests.
Why did JotForm expand its product offering?
Being a 100-percent bootstrapped company, we spent the better part of the first decade of our existence setting out to create the highest quality form software on the market. This meant religiously listening to customers and building out new functionality and features to make the process of creating and managing forms as frictionless as possible.
As we grew to 1 million, then 5 million users, and beyond, we saw even more opportunities to create new products to complement our flagship online form builder and help our customers do even more.
Some of the notable products we launched in the last few years include PDF Editor, Tables, JotForm Approvals, and Mobile Forms.
What are some of JotForm’s newer products?
One of our newer and most popular products is JotForm PDF Editor. This product makes it easy for customers to turn form replies, invoices, contracts, and legal documents into editable and secure PDF documents. In addition, we also have hundreds of PDF templates, so users don’t have to start from scratch.
Another one of our products is JotForm Tables, which is a data-collection and workflow automation solution.
Let’s look at an example.
Say you create a customer feedback survey. All of your responses will automatically populate your table. You can add extra columns for additional information that your team can add in later.
You can also build customizable workflows and approval processes to act on the data in real time. And you can organize the survey feedback into a polished exportable report through JotForm Report Builder. The best part is that you can do all of this without ever leaving JotForm Tables.
Another one of our products is Mobile Forms. It allows our customers to create and manage forms on their smartphones and tablets. They can even access and fill out forms on the spot without Wi-Fi or cell reception. Once they’re back online, their data will automatically sync with their JotForm account.
Some additional Mobile Form features include voice recording, geolocation, barcode scanning, a camera widget, and e-signatures.
For example, if you run a tree removal business, you can create mobile inspection forms that all of your tree removal specialists can fill out. They can add details, take photos, and include geolocation data from their phone while they’re on the job site.
A final product that I’ll mention is JotForm Approvals. This is a way to make your team’s approval processes more efficient.
One of the most popular use cases is employee vacation request forms. Employees used to send an email to their manager requesting time off. The manager would then add the information into their HR system for additional approvals. Once approved, the manager would email/tell the employee whether or not their request was approved. This system is wildly inefficient.
A better way is to use JotForm to create your vacation request form. Then, once an employee submits a request, it triggers an automated approval process using conditional logic to route the request to the appropriate approvers. Everything is automated, making it easy to complete approvals.
What are some trends you’re paying attention to in the future?
One of the biggest trends that we’re paying attention to is the rise of the no-code/low-code movement. JotForm is inherently a no-code solution.
Just a decade ago, if you wanted to spin up a custom application, you had to be a coder. These days, anyone with an idea and a little creativity can build their own complex workflows and apps using tools like JotForm with little to no code.
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