Sell Something Bigger Than Your Otherwise Boring Business
It isn’t every day that I hop on a Skype call with a startup founder who is so blunt.
“We don’t sell online forms. We make organizations more productive,” he subtly corrects me. “It’s a deceptively small difference. After all, who cares about boring surveys? I started JotForm 13 years ago, and even I’m not passionate about forms.”
I had never heard of JotForm. Yet another website you can use to build surveys, was my first impression.
An arrogant assumption, yes — I probably could have benefited from doing some research before our call — but I knew Google Forms at least. And I knew TypeForm, which was announcing one investment round after another; they were the cool kids within startup circles.
What I didn’t know, however, was how meeting JotForm’s founder Aytekin was about to change everything I knew about doing business.
What’s beyond your otherwise boring business?
The charts Aytekin shares on his screen make me notice an interesting insight: the numbers of both paid and free users of his company, whose name I had never even heard before, were high. Indeed, they were way higher than those of their competitors who showed off their public figures on the frontage of TechCrunch.
