This is a pretty exciting week in the office. We invited several people to help us test the latest version of JotForm. It was eye opening to see how people behave on these tests. We have always done quick “what do you think about this site” or “what do you think about this feature” kind of tests with other people and since we always get feedback emails from people we thought we understood how other people use our web application. How wrong we were!
Phishing is a big problem. There are literally gangs which employ people in Nigeria to create phishing forms all day long. We know it because we are on the front lines. Our phishing filters suspend hundreds of phishers every month.
Since we are working very hard to make creating web forms easier, as an unfortunate side effect, phishers also prefer JotForm to create their forms. I am not sure if we should be flattered about this. 
What I am sure is that we have to fight hard to stop phishers, just like PayPal had to fight fraud hard to become one true Internet payment service.
We were fighting a losing war until couple of years ago. We had to manually review all suspicious forms. It was incredibly time consuming and phishers were creating new forms faster than we can delete them. So, we came up with a breakthrough idea. We implemented a Bayesian filter that detects and suspends phishing forms. Basically, we were using statistics to determine if a given form is doing phishing or not. It worked amazingly well. Whatever new ideas phishers came up with, our Bayesian filter quickly learned and adapted.
We have huge amount of data on phisher behavior; types of forms they create, commonly used words, types of tactics they use, where they come from etc. If you are a researcher or a student working on a thesis, feel free to contact me and I can provide you lots of data to play with.
How do you monetize a web application or a web site? What kind of business model makes long term success more likely? These topics are being discussed to death on many web business discussion boards. There are mainly two camps of thought: Cripple the product or provide 30-day trial period then disable it unless user buys it. I call them crippleware and trialware. I don’t like any of these approaches. I believe the best strategy is to only charge users when they are successful.
Like every successful relationship, business and customers need to meet in a middle ground. Both sides must be happy. If one side thinks they are being screwed, they will not like it and will probably leave at the first opportunity. Crippled products or trial versions are bad because one side on the relationship knows that the other side is only in it for the money and does not care about them. You can use these approaches successfully and probably can make more money in the short term, but you will also limit growth of the product.
If you limit the users too early, they will have to stop using the service before they reach to a critical point where they can completely learn and utilize your service. What do you think?
Lean thinking is about eliminating waste. Every web application must have a single main purpose. Everything else should be optimized to make that goal easy to reach. If you look at most of the existing web applications today, there are just so many things that wastes user’s time and energy: Read the rest of this entry »
When I named my blog “Web Applications are the Future” more than 4 years ago, there was a big discussion among software developers on if the web applications can replace desktop applications. Nobody discusses that any more. Probably because web applications have pretty much won. They are getting faster and easier to use every day.
That’s why I decided to rename my blog to “Lean Web Applications”. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on what is a “lean web application” and how to develop them in my future posts. We are developing new version of JotForm with these ideas so I am going to have many thoughts to share on this topic.
Drag and drop is one of the most underused features on web applications. Although there are really cool libraries, we haven’t seen a lot of adoption on this front. Using drag and drop on a web application can make it user friendly. It gives users flexibility to easily place and sort objects which can be very difficult and sometimes ugly to accomplish with buttons or links.
Here is a look at seven of the most creative drag and drop web applications:
It has been six months since Apple released push notifications however the adoption has been pretty low among website monitoring tools. Probably because creating an iPhone App is not a trivial task. This tutorial describes how to use free tools available (mainly JotForm iPhone App) to send your iPhone push notifications when there is a problem on your site.
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A recent eHow tutorial describes how to use JotForm to create email lists and send them newsletters or your offerings. One of the greatest ways to increase your sales is to send your users periodical emails. Don’t overdo it. Send them sparsely. We usually send our users 2-3 times a year and only if we have a major news such as a new version or a discount.
Include real information and provide some value in your emails. Spend your time to make it look fine.
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It has been a week since we released JotForm iPhone App and the interest has been more than what we excepted. Over 450 users have installed JotForm App on their iPhone in the first week. Our users also provided nice reviews:
We’re very excited to announce that JotForm iPhone App is now available on iPhone App Store!
It is completely Free. Install it today to receive and access your form submissions anywhere! You can …
We have finally completed our JotForm iPhone app and submitted it to Apple for review. Once approved it will be completely free to all JotForm users. I would like to share how we developed the new application with user feedback.
SitePoint has always been one my favorite sites. In 2001, they featured one of my free scripts on their newsletter and pointed thousands of people to download it. It was a big rush to see so many users starting using my product. That’s how I started reading them. Back then, they were a small webmaster site and I’m glad they still kept that feeling of being close to their community.
SitePoint is running a nice article “The Foolproof Form Design Formula”. It is actually a chapters from their new book Fancy Form Design. The article suggests defining user personas for your forms and creating prototypes/wireframes to foolproof your form.
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We have recently switched to a new hardware architecture for our JotForm form builder service. I am pretty pleased with it because we were able to do it without any downtime or any problems for our users. As a result of this switch, JotForm now has much better high availability, speed and security. It was also a lot of fun to do it.
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Being a home seller in this economy must be pretty tough. There is help now! HomeSeller Software has just been released. Its goal is to provide home owners with all of the tools, knowledge and feedback necessary to succeed. Best of all, it is completely free.
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DogSearcher is one of coolest sites we have worked on. As a part of our Complete Membership Site Solution we provided design and development services. Dog Searcher is a community site for dog owners. Users can discuss various dog related topics on the forum, make posts on their blog, create profiles for their dogs and even sell their puppies to other dog lovers. This site is also very rich in content. There are many useful articles about taking care of dogs. They have even started using the new Memberkit Answers application to create a Q&A section on the site.
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For a growing startup, customer support is one of the most important things. You need to be talking to them to:
We receive many support emails every day. We also have multiple people responsible for our products. That’s why I researched a lot about the helpdesk solutions and found out that they are too complex, confusing and difficult to maintain. Instead we have been using Gmail for many years and it worked well for us.
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I am happy to announce that Memberkit 1.0 Beta is finally here!
Memberkit has probably been the biggest project we have ever completed for everyone in our team. We have been working on it for more than three years. Most people don’t know this but actually JotForm was a byproduct of Memberkit. We needed a really good form builder to make customizations easier and there came out JotForm. Today it is a very successful web service with over 100,000 users.
Memberkit has taken such a long time to complete because we really wanted to create something that is powerful but at the same time easy to use. Memberkit is on the low level a web development framework for non-programmers. Yes, you have read it correctly. It is a web framework. It is similar to web frameworks such as ruby on rails, but it does not require programming.
We are not advertising it in such a way though. Instead of attacking such a generic problem and creating something that might not be perfect for anybody, we have built something great for membership sites. We will not think about the future for the time being and just focus on making Memberkit a kickass product for social networking and subscription based sites.
Memberkit started small as an idea, grow into cool but unreachable spec, and after a very long and harsh development became an exciting product. We don’t know how successful it will be, but no matter what, we have created something we can be proud of rest of our lives.
So, what makes Memberkit such a killer application?
1. It is a web development framework for non-programmers
We think we have created an innovative solution for webmasters and web designers. Most people who create web sites are not programmers. If you are one of them, you have two options. You can either create simple static web sites or you can download and install web applications produced by commercial or open source programmers. Usually these applications are difficult to install and more importantly impossible to customize according to your needs. What if there was another option? What if you could write your own custom web applications without needing programmers or being a programmer? We think we have a product that makes this possible. Watch this video if you would like to see it with your eyes.
2. Growing number of social applications on the Memberkit App Gallery
One of the things we really wanted to make sure was to make it dead easy to share a web application you created and install an existing application from the App Gallery. They are both very easy now. You can share an application with a single click. You can also install an application with a single click.
3. Strong Subscriptions Features
We have worked with thousands of membership sites over the last decade. So, we are pretty familiar with their needs and changes happening in the industry. One of the most important reasons for the growth of the membership sites today is because people are increasingly getting used to paying for good content and features. You usually get what you pay for. So, Memberkit has built in recurring subscription payment features.
We are also strong believer of growing a product with user feedback. We would love to hear your questions and comments. Please take a look at our tour and demo. Feel free to explore Memberkit and let us know what you think.
Today, I was surprised to discover that I already have 74 Google Docs documents and pretty much stopped using Microsoft Office for the last year. It certainly did not happen intentionally. I think I’ve first started using Google Docs in 2006. I have been using more and more Google Docs since then. Today I have no need for Microsoft Office and I am surprisingly pretty happy about it.
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I am always fascinated with good writing. Maybe because it has many things in common with good software. A good user interface just flows. It is invisible. You get the task done without confusion. It might even be fun. Good writing has that quality as well. It captures the reader’s attention. Writing becomes invisible and the story becomes the reality. Both good writing and good software flows with the user. They provide a sense of accomplishment.
When I was in school, it took me all weekend to write a paper with couple of pages. Some people could write that in an hour. It was tough for me. Especially since English was my second language. But here is the interesting part. I always liked writing. It was tough but I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed every minute of it. My ideas were probably not that great. My writing was pretty bad. But it felt great to put things on paper.
In software, you start with a zero byte file. It is like an empty sheet of paper. Then you put things on it. Sometimes work on it for months. You get ideas and put them there. Instead of words, you code the ideas. Suddenly those ideas become reality for the user. If you are lucky, millions of people might even run the code you created.
A good writing is usually simple. Short sentences are good. Being to the point is good. Same applies to software. It is very hard work to make a user interfaces simple. The first draft you create is usually a very complex peace of mess. Then you work on it and refine it. You Keep it Simple, Stupid. KISS principle applies both to writing and software.
[Some thoughts I have had while reading a book called "On Writing Well" by Williaam Zinsser.]
Aytekin Tank is cofounder of Interlogy Internet Technologies. The company that created the popular JotForm web form builder. Developing web applications is his passion.