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A better form builder

Keenforms Post Launch Retro

So first the good news – By making the front page on Hacker News and posting on Indie Hackers we had over 1800 page views on the first day of our launch, and over 100 users signed up to try it out. Most of those people created a form. Also received quality feedback, some of which we’ve deployed within 48 hours of launch (we added the for tag for labels to make it easier to read on screen readers for those who are visually impaired).

Next the areas to improve;

While most new sign ups created a form, few created a form rule. The form rules are the biggest differentiator for keenforms. Compared to other form builders there are lots of things we don’t have – easily copied templates, a date picker, a 1-5 star ranking, the ability to upload your logo, multi column layout, etc. Some of those features will be added as time goes on, but this is the MVP.

However while keenforms doesn’t have all the features that the bigger more established form builders have, we do something that no other form builder I’ve seen is capable of – the ability to create dynamic on the fly interactions in a form, with complex conditional, with no code.

Your current form builder may claim it does conditions, but there’s only one form builder that I’m aware of that does anything like conditional calculations. You cannot do compound conditional calculations. No one is doing conditional validations. That is a hard sell though, and many form builder users don’t know that they might want conditional calculations and validations. They just know they can’t do what they want with their current form builder.

There is also a learning curve to using a rules engine. We’re going to need to provide better documentation on how to do the more complex stuff. It might mean a wiki, perhaps videos, and maybe a tutorial.

It’s a work in progress. There’s a long way to go, however I’m really proud of how keenforms is coming along. I hope you will check us out.