20+ Million Users Strong: Bootstrapped Journey of Aytekin Tank Founder of Jotform and Its AI Agent Evolution | S2 Ep. 157

0:04Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have a very special guest and I can't wait to dive in but itekin tonk 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 jot form like who has not used jot form everyone has right i think everyone i know has has some sort of experience but i can't wait to dive in with you though around what you're doing with ai and how 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 job form what made you say i want to be an entrepreneur i just when i was a student uh when i was in college um like um i made this uh product uh for our like um student organization and um Like this product was allowing people to like, I was also making the website for the organization.

1:11And I was like this, you know, it was actually allowing people to create these, you know, create their accounts, like create their 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 love to see 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 really triggered that entrepreneurship mindset.

1:59But I had no confidence in myself. So I found a full-time job. 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, 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, was to, you know, like seeing how our editors needed forms all the time. Like they were constantly 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 actually my initial thought was like if I if I can find a product that could take this away from me, that I didn't have to do it.

3:18So I searched for the product. I did my market research and I couldn't find a good product. Like there was a survey market, but that could only do like surveys. So that's when I knew that this is a good market, because there's a big need and people are going online. People need forms online. So, you know, I quit my job and started a job form. that, you know, I released job form in 2006. That's almost two decades ago. 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 people that you were around the job that you had before is where you found the problem.

4:08I'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 job form. 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. um i would say uh like in the beginning i released it as a free product because i wanted to see i wanted to actually test that like if people really needed this uh if there was a uh need and like how can i get feedback from users um so and i i released it completely free february 2006 and and then uh 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 uh it's ready like just uh just like you know a couple of hours later i would like do whatever they needed like just respond back to them and uh i completed that and uh that kind of gave me the idea that like this is really gonna work but um the first year it was all free and the second year like uh 2007 uh i decided okay let's release a premium version i hired my first employee like we worked on the premium paid version for a while we added some features some cool features and we added some limit limits to the free version and then you know when we released that that was like 2007 March like uh so so far we had like 15 ,000 users and then I was able to get like 500 500 of them upgraded to the paid version it was only like nine dollars per month but uh that was still that I knew that if you know if if I can get like 500 customers uh that that's the point that I knew that this is a you know business that's this is going to be like a reliable business it's going to be a successful business i didn't i didn't know how big it would be just to give you one example uh like i created this document and uh and the title was how to get to one million users and uh and i wrote like as a subtitle i know that you know we will probably never get to one million users but this is like a brain exercise like you know just a brainstorming exercise and and a year later uh like i was just like searching for something else like and we already had like millions of users and then i found this document and then i was like wow uh i remember writing this document and there was a list of like 30 different things that we should be doing and we actually tried uh pretty much all of them and most of them actually didn't work but there were some that really worked uh so so that was a surprise for me so uh that actually tells me that i never was sure how big we could get uh so today we have 25 million users uh we have like 700 employees um you know uh offices around the world in seven different cities so we got pretty big uh comparing to that earlier days like you know the first five years the first year i'm like you know i'm i started myself 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 sales businesses that's the case because especially if you're bootstrapping you don't have funds to hire more people.

8:17You go much more slowly. But the great thing is like you have the independence, you have the freedom to kind of choose your own path and, you know, take long vacations if you would like. You know, it's less stressful. And so, and, you know, when I mentor startups, like most of the time, like, you know, they are saying like, hey, 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 uh so it's just i think it's about patience and persistence uh especially in a bootstrap businesses and if you can have that like 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 site on 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 ask for or like you know build features for them like or their ideas you have your customers to answer, right?

9:43And then you're, 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. Wow. 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 the founders that we've had or people I've spoken to because they had to raise money.

10:20They 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 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? 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?

11:10In 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 help 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 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.

11:50You are giving feedback about some product. You are buying a product, maybe making a purchase. There's just so many reasons that you fill out forms. And so we have a saying at JotForm 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. People create forms, their users fill out those forms, and then something else happens. Maybe they need to ship an order. Maybe it's a lead form, and then someone is interested in their product, service.

12:42They need to get back to them. Someone is registering for an event, and that needs to be tracked. And just emails need to be sent. Maybe e-signatures need to be signed. There is just 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 people fill out these forms, right?

13:37So that's what we started to like research. Like, you know, we have user researchers 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 learn 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. So 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.

14:20So this actually gave me the opportunity to build all those additional products as well, like, you know, an e-signature product, a workflow approach product, document generation, like PDF generation product. And like we built this Airtable like, you know, table spreadsheet product as well. Like so reporting tools. So we will build 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 like how can we use the 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 JotFone who had been doing AI previously to kind of catch these bad guys like fishers, spammers.

15:28They 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 turn 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 call that job 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 chat bot you could embed a chat chat bot 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.

16:27So this actually allows us to like replace more and more of the things, not just the forms, but also being able to like provide customer support, maybe do sales, you know, all the things that can be done. with an AI agent. And it's very exciting. Like just the capabilities of AI is incredible. So we have been working on that recently. Wow, 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.

17:24I'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 our daily lives and from the perspective of an entrepreneur? So when people say AI agents or agentic, they might mean different things. But the basic idea is that 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. 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.

18:11And it goes out to the world and does it for you. Like if you need the research, like that's 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 use Jot from AI agents, which is going to be released in February 2025, and you just 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 agents is here.

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20:09Indeed.com slash Founders Story. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. Like this. I imagine a world where every organization, every business, even every person actually has this AI agent that represents them. So let's say in the middle of the night, you're going to send your kids to a summer school, summer camp, and then you have a question in your mind, right? You cannot just call them in the middle of the night, right? You cannot ask a question. Right. But if if 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 answers.

21:00And if they if you need to purchase something additional or something, you could just do it right away, right there and right, you know, in 3 a.m. 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're 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 agents. You can even like see live conversations happening.

21:41And 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 percent. 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 percent either like we are we make all these mistakes like if we are if we lose if we 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.

22:37So 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 uh 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 uh like they are much more comfortable and if they if they don't get the answer they you know they ask again uh and uh so it's it's actually people don't have any problem and like and chp t has been out 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 um 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.

23:56And 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 day long, they just revive all those beta conversations, beta users. And then they're just marking all these errors and then the engineers are fixing those problems. and it's just a way 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 except that usually people who are small businesses use Jackform a lot.

24:43And a small business owner, instead of not being able to answer a customer or just being too busy and not being able to return to them. They actually prefer an AI to handle all these issues like sales and customer support issues. So it's pretty exciting. 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 businesses that don't always have the ability to have these resources can now do that and compete at even a bigger level.

25:41And I can't wait to see how these other SaaS founders, how they can grow their companies as a single person. We keep hearing about when is there going to be the single business owner who all they have are AI agents and they create a billion-dollar 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 our lives much easier. So if people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information, how can they do so?

26:27So I have a website, like myfirstname, lastname.com, itakenTank.com. you can talk to my ai agent i taken ai if you go to my website and try the ai agents product that way as well also with the ai agents just from.com slash ai you could go there and you could enter the wait list and sometimes you know we we still you know 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 send me your message that way and it can take notes.

27:14So that's a great way to be able to communicate with people through an AI agent. I love that. We're having like a personal conversation with people that we normally would probably never get to help 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 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 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.

27:54because if it can 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. 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 Founder's Story. Thank you, Dan, for having me on your show. Thank you.