Making $500k+/mo as a serial founder

Today I'm interviewing Farokh, the co-founder and CEO of Formaloo, a no-code & form builder. They're currently doing a Black Friday deal on AppSumo (he'll talk about that later).

Hey! What's your background and what are you working on?

Hi! I’m Farokh Shahabi, co-founder and CEO of Formaloo, a powerful no-code collaboration platform for teams to collect, organize and understand their data. With Formaloo you can build custom apps for your business, as easy as playing with legos, without any code!

Right now more than 25,000 businesses are using Formaloo every month and we’re growing at an average rate of 15% month over month. Formaloo is also recognized as the #1 leader in the database category by GetApp, the High Performer company by G2, and the Emerging Favorite company of 2022 by Capterra.

We also recently raised a $2M investment round to grow Formaloo faster and turn Formaloo into the biggest no-code database tool on the planet.

A little background on myself, I’m a serial entrepreneur and founded 3 successful companies so far. I previously served in key leadership or advisory roles in several startups in 10+ countries and worked with various VCs, accelerators, and organizations internationally. Some of my most noteworthy experiences are co-founding Eventbox, international event management & organization platform for professional organizers, Hostinstall, one of the UK’s finest data & web solution providers, and also Bipfa, which was MENA’s biggest Micro-blogging Platform.

How did you get the idea for Formaloo and how did you get started?

Before Formaloo, I had a data analytics company and our expertise was developing data-driven business applications for enterprises all over the world. It was going really well and we had a lot of great customers, but we saw a major problem that every one of our customers faced.

Every day, they asked us to do a lot of customizations and modifications to their systems. This constant adding of features and customizations was very time-consuming for us, and very expensive for them.

After a while, we had an idea: What if we created a platform so they can create their own software, without any coding?

We created an MVP based on this idea and gave it to our customers. They loved it so much that they said: OK, we pay you for this, please add these features to it.

That’s how the idea of Formaloo was formed and that’s how we got our early adopters, all of our customers became Formaloo customers.

How have you attracted users and grown Formaloo?

When we launched, we just finished developing our MVP, finally decided on our name, and got the domain. We weren't sure about our business model or marketing strategies, we didn’t even had a paid version at that time.

But, we were excited to launch our first version to the world and get their feedback. Our product was (almost embarrassingly) simple with limited functionality.

We launched, and as we were completely bootstrapped, we didn’t have any promotional budget, so we relied on the “word of mouth” of our first users to get new customers.

It was a huge success. In a few weeks, we had thousands of “beta users” testing our platform and giving us constructive (and harsh!) feedback. That feedback, and those suggestions, ultimately turned out to be all the market research we needed to launch the full version of our business.

After the first year, each beta tester of Formaloo brought 11.2 additional customers to us on average, this level of product-led growth is priceless.

Fast forward three years, now we have 25,000 amazing businesses using Formaloo every month and still, our biggest success factor is the feedback of our clients.

Do you plan to do anything for this Black Friday/Cyber Monday to promote Formaloo?

Yes! This black Friday is going to be our biggest event of the year!
The main reason is that now that we raised our new round of investment, we’re on the verge of launching the next version of Formaloo with about 30 new features. This is going to be our biggest launch ever!

Formaloo has always grown from within its community. The amazing community of thousands of no-code developers, agencies, and business users who made Formaloo what it is today with their feedback, suggestions, and collaborations.

That’s why we’re launching a big campaign this Black Friday. We’d love to get your feedback for our upcoming launch and that’s why we’re giving away Lifetime Access of Formaloo on AppSumo for a very limited time. This means you can have lifetime access to Formaloo and all of our future updates for as little as 99$! It won't’ get better than that!

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

In 2022, we grew our ARR by more than 700% compared to 2021. Our projection for next year is that we will reach $3M ARR.

We’re a SaaS business. We have monthly and annual subscriptions based on the number of team members per company and their usage.

It goes without saying that our Black Friday lifetime deal is for unlimited usage and there’s no monthly fee.

What's your tech stack?

At its core, Formaloo is a database management system that anyone can easily add interfaces on top of it. When you create a formaloo, a database, a business logic, and a full UI connected to it are created for you.

Since we’re big on working with scalable data, our infrastructure is built on Python and we do have AI and machine learning modules that help us serve millions of people at the same time. Right now more than 7 million people interact with Formaloo every month.

Formaloo is built for scale, we have business with millions of data points in their systems. Formaloo has workflow automation systems and other features to help businesses automate their procedures.

For developers, we have Formaloo SDK which helps developers to build applications with Formaloo as their full infrastructure. We also have Formaloo API, Webhooks, GraphQL support, and custom module development ready in place.

We have US and EU-based cloud infrastructures so everyone can enjoy full GDPR and HIPAA compliance in their workspaces.

How has COVID-19 impacted you or Formaloo at all?

Actually, it helped us a lot! Since every team has now adopted the remote or hybrid work mindset, they need tools like Formaloo to manage their team, processes, and workflows. Formaloo is one of the most popular tools that is used by remote teams all over the world.

The no-code industry has grown 10 times in the past 5 years alone, also the rise of Covid-19 and remote working accelerated this growth tremendously.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

Most startups die before ever reaching their first 100 active users. Getting the first customers to trust your product is one of the most difficult challenges every startup faces in the early days.

The biggest advice that I have is this:

“The best time to launch your MVP is when it’s working, but you think you’re not ready to launch.”

Creating even a “coming soon” website will force you to answer hard questions about your startup. Who are my customers and target audience? How should I present my product? What’s my positioning in the market? And many more.

The most important test of a good website is to see if your target audience

1. Understand what you do at first glance and

2. Trust you and your approach enough to give it a try.

Also

• Share the story of your startup. It’s not only about your startup, it’s about the story behind your startup. Why did you start this company? What do you do? And, How do you do it? How are you better than others?

People love to know about the history of your company, the people behind it, your challenges, and your achievements. So tell them your story!

Features are for nerds, talk about benefits. Talking about features could become boring very fast! A good practice is that always state the benefit and value of the most essential features you have instead. By expressing their benefits, people are more likely to understand them and give them a try.

Also, by stating their benefits clearly, you can make your features attractive and discover what’s not working. If a feature cannot clearly be communicated via its benefits, something is wrong.

• Study similar products and your alternatives. No product is unique and without alternatives. Research and study all of your alternatives. No alternative is too small if your customers are using them instead of you.

• Get inspiration from success stories and take notes on what made them stand out among their competitors.

• Learn from the mistakes of your competitors A good practice is to monitor your competitors very closely. Use their mistakes as your leverage and learn from their good practices.

• Reach out to the people who use similar products Learn what’s important for your target customers, what they like about those products, and what they hate about them. Look for clues in their experiences to make your product better and more useful for them.

• Customer Success is everything. All successful startups have one thing in common: They invest heavily in customer success and customer support.

It’s not just about answering your customers' questions or issues, it’s all about making sure that your customer is successfully achieving their goal by using your product.

Every team member in your organization should help with customer support. Some organizations take this even further, for example, all employees of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, start their job there, by working for at least 1 month as customer support agents! That’s how vital this is.

Most of your users (and leads) don’t have an issue when they contact you, they just have a question or couldn’t find something that they need. So for your and your customers’ sake, create a full helpdesk and knowledge base system that covers everything basic and advanced in your product.