Welcome to another interview by Website Planet. Learn how the best online companies have built their online presence, how they stand out, and their predictions for the future.
Our guest today is Ben Fine, CEO and Co-Founder of Formsort, a low-code form builder that lets users create highly customizable forms that align perfectly with their brand. In 2023 alone, 22 million forms were filled out on the Formsort platform.
After studying applied mathematics at Harvard, Ben started his career at Blackstone before leaving to build the digital mortgage lender Better.com. At Better, Ben and his co-founders saw the need for more powerful form building tools that would enable teams to build and improve their most important forms without engineers. .
Ben shared the key factors and tools that helped make Formsort one of the few low-code form builders on the market that provides the flexibility and power of custom engineered forms without requiring engineering.
What problems are you solving with your products and services?
Forms are a fundamental component of any website or software application. When facing the decision to build versus buy, many teams struggle with the high costs and time requirements associated with in-house development.
These challenges become particularly acute when it comes to iterating and testing new ideas, which can be time-intensive without the right tools and processes. Form builders are a really nice solution to this problem in theory, but most form builders fall short in terms of design flexibility and functionality.Formsort combines the ease of a form builder with the comprehensive customization typically seen in custom built solutions. Our platform allows users to control everything from the visual design to complex business logic, and provides functionality to manage and improve the form over time.
🚀 Companies using our software will typically save hundreds of engineering hours while improving conversion rates on their most important forms by upwards of 30%.
What are the top reasons people choose you over competitors?
Customers choose us because our software enables beautiful designs and for its deep customization capabilities. Formsort’s form builder allows complete control over form aesthetics, making each customer interaction feel like a natural extension of the brand it represents.
Formsort tightly integrates with any existing tech stack, which helps maintain a unified view of customer data and makes analyzing form performance within broader marketing and product data easier. The ability to iterate and launch variants of their forms without requiring technical expertise helps our clients experiment faster. That velocity drives results; for example, Candid, one of our customers, achieved a 30% increase in sales by optimizing their forms with us.
By choosing Formsort, our PMs and marketers have focused on building what makes Vial special. Not only are we given this technical advantage, the Formsort team there feels like an extension of our own. Simon Burns, Co-founder & CEO of Vial
How is your product built?
Our product is built with TypeScript and React on the front end and uses Python on the backend. The system runs on AWS which helps with scalability, reliability, and flexibility.
Our product is constantly evolving based on user feedback. For example, we recently revamped the core form building user interface to make it easier to use and to allow users to more quickly understand and modify their forms by making critical information like conditional logic visible without requiring drilling down a level.
Our New UI The Old UI
Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?
While we’ve experimented with various marketing strategies like paid ads, SEO, and cold outreach, we’ve found that nothing compares to word-of-mouth and direct referrals from satisfied customers. This has led us to focus intensely on delivering exceptional customer service and ensuring our platform consistently delivers value, enabling our users to achieve their goals effectively.
One powerful attribute of the service we provide is that the forms people create with our software are shared with others to collect data, exposing those responders to Formsort. Some percentage of those responders turn into Formsort users themselves, creating a growth flywheel.
What are the most important tools in your techstack?
While it might sound straightforward, we’re big believers in going back to basics, which is why the most critical tools in our tech stack are those that facilitate communication with our customers. This includes everything from scaled conversations via our documentation site (Gitbook) to more personalized interactions through our in-app support software (Intercom) and scheduled bookings (Calendly). These tools form the backbone of our customer-facing operations.
One tool that has significantly impacted my personal productivity is Fathom. This notetaking service records meetings and then leverages LLMs to synthesize conversations and automatically generates to-dos. Being able to fully focus on the person I’m talking to rather than worrying about taking notes is incredibly powerful.
A look into the future
The software landscape is being reshaped by Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are obviously useful for content creation and we see their power in creating drafts of forms based on prompts, brainstorming ideas to test, or even writing complex logic in our code editor. I’m not sure we as an industry have discovered the best way to weave this functionality into products yet but that’s an exciting frontier we’re watching closely.
Similarly, using LLMs to analyze, synthesize, and suggest actions on data feels like a massive opportunity for us and for the software industry more broadly. Formsort exists to facilitate a scaled conversation between our user and their responders, and extending that conversation with analysis, insights, and even follow-ups would be incredibly powerful for our users.
Bethenny eats, sleeps, and breathes digital marketing. She helps clients take charge of brand awareness and create lead generation strategies via a number of marketing channels, including email, social media, SEO, and content. When not a marketing superwoman, you can find her playing with her three dogs on her five-acre property, or planting yummy treats in her vegetable garden. (She is also a bit of a Real Housewives junky, #guiltypleasure!)
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