You have a brilliant idea for a product that solves real problems. Your customers love it. But you’re competing in one of the most expensive markets in the world against better-funded rivals with brand recognition and distribution you can only dream of. How do you scale without burning through cash or losing sight of what users actually want?
In this episode of SaaS That App: Building B2B Web Applications, Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of Jotform, joins Justin Edwards to share how he took Jotform from a one-person side project to a 25-million-user SaaS business, bootstrapped, profitable, and thriving even while competing with giants like Google.
Start Simple. Ship Fast. Learn Constantly.
Before Jotform, Aytekin was a software developer managing over a hundred content sites. He kept getting requests from editors for new forms: contact, contests, payments, you name it. It was repetitive HTML work he couldn’t streamline because the tools on the market weren’t designed for it.
So he quit and built the tool he wished existed. There was no term for SaaS yet. No playbook for PLG. Just a gut instinct: if he made it easy to build forms and gave it away for free, people would try it, give feedback, and help make it better.
That instinct paid off. Early users flooded his support forum with bugs, small frustrations, and feature ideas. He fixed them within hours. The speed of iteration created loyalty and a culture where users felt like co-builders. Free wasn’t a sacrifice. It was the engine.
How to Turn Free Users Into Paying Customers
After eight months of building, Aytekin launched Jotform’s free version. A year later, there were 15,000 users relying on it daily. But they weren’t paying. Introducing paid was terrifying. Would anyone subscribe? Would users abandon the product? Was freemium even a viable model?
The moment they launched premium, the answer arrived. First sale: a university in Spain. Then one in the UK. The US. Every upgrade was proof that people saw value and would pay for more of it. Aytekin still remembers that day as the moment he knew Jotform could become a real business.
The Freemium Myth
Not everyone loves freemium. Many SaaS founders argue that it creates expensive support burdens and slow monetization. Jotform tested the force upgrades faster strategy by cutting free payments from ten submissions to just three.
Revenue spiked. Mission accomplished. Not quite. When Aytekin looked at the data months later, growth had stalled. Fewer people could meaningfully test the product, so fewer ever upgraded. They restored the original limits, and the growth curve recovered instantly.
The lesson: don’t use constraints to pressure customers. Use generosity to earn them.
Fighting the Google Effect with Automation and Delegation
One morning, a friend messaged Aytekin: “Google just launched Google Forms.” A trillion-dollar competitor had entered his category. He could panic or he could execute. He chose execution.
At the time, Aytekin was still doing everything: support, HR, accounting, and office supplies. If he wanted to beat Google, he needed to free himself from busy work. He began automating every internal process possible using Jotform itself and hired support staff to take over frontline requests.
This mindset eventually became his book Automate Your Busywork, built around a simple flywheel:
- Map every workflow
- Audit your time
- Automate the tasks you hate most
- Reinforce progress with the time you just saved
The result? More founder time spent on product and innovation, the only areas where scrappy startups can outperform tech giants.
When AI Products Break the Rules
Two decades later, Jotform is thriving and evolving again. This time with AI. During a dedicated hack week, the team built a prototype that let users complete forms via a conversational chatbot. Users loved it, but not for forms.
They deployed it on their websites to answer customer questions. That unexpected behavior became a product pivot: Jotform AI Agents, bots that don’t just respond but act. But Jotform didn’t assume success. They used it internally first.
When AI Agents launched inside Jotform support, resolution rates were just 25%. Instead of writing it off, support staff used the time saved to review every failed conversation, tag the issue, and send insight back to engineering. Within three months, resolution rates hit 75%.
Documentation improved. Tooling improved. The AI improved. And that same loop now powers Jotform AI, a platform that lets users build and edit forms using natural language. Aytekin’s takeaway: AI products don’t follow classic UX rules. You can’t focus on screens; you focus on outcomes.
Final Thoughts
From day one, Jotform’s biggest growth lever wasn’t paid marketing or viral hacks. It was this loop: Give value — Attract usage — Gather feedback — Improve — Repeat.
It worked in 2006. It still works today. And it’s how a bootstrapped form builder outlasted and out-innovated companies with far deeper pockets.
Aytekin’s Background
Aytekin Tank is the Founder and CEO of Jotform, a bootstrapped SaaS platform that has grown to serve 25 million users globally. With a background in computer science, Aytekin has built his career around solving automation challenges for businesses, nonprofits, healthcare, and education sectors. He is the author of Automate Your Busy Work, host of the AI Agents podcast, and a pioneering voice in agentic AI development. Aytekin’s work in product-led growth, freemium strategies, and AI-driven customer support has made him an essential voice for founders and tech leaders navigating the intersection of automation and artificial intelligence.
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