To quote Will Ferrell, “I’ve seen Wufoo and it is glorious.” Er… well, something like that.
But seriously, Wufoo IS a dream come true to most people who want to collect data on their sites. Wufoo offers amazingly simple tools to create compelling and rich forms for your Web site, as well as interfaces for users to access and run reports on the data . These features alone are what put them on the map as an up-and-coming Internet startup.
But the “foo” doesn’t stop there, my friend. Wufoo can also help advanced coders save time since they provide access and interaction with your data from outside the Wufoo servers through their handy API. That’s a great “work-around” for those of you who have some server-side scripting capability, but no database provided by your hosting service. It’s also great if you’ve got multiple sites that may use the same data in different ways and you don’t want to get into setting up remote connections.
We recently caught up with Wufoo co-founder, Kevin Hale, who took some time to explain what Wufoo is, how they got where they are, and what the team’s been up to lately. As if these guys aren’t busy enough, they are also founders of the much praised web design and development magazine, Particle Tree. So, thanks Kevin!
Name, age, hair color, foot size, and when you sleep at night you dream about…?
Kevin Hale, 25, brown, 11, Genghis Khan, baboons, creepy Spanish children.
Chris Campbell, 26, brown, 9.5, A world where transportation is replaced with vacuum tubes.
Ryan Campbell, 24, greyish brown, 9.5, HTML forms.
Some folks may be unfamiliar with what you’re doing. With 5 words, describe Wufoo for them.
That’s easy:
Making forms easy + fast + fun.
Actually, too easy. Hers’s some more:
Awesome Online HTML form builder
Better alternative to Microsoft Access
Weird name, awesome web application
Where was the idea behind Wufoo conceptualized? Who was there? How much has the original idea evolved?
On the steps of the Austin Convention Center at SXSW Interactive 2005. All three of us were there. Basically, after a day of panels we decided that there was absolutely nothing separating us from any other successful person at the conference.
The initial vision of Wufoo was as an ASP content manager with the ability to allow for unlimited inputs and reversible forms, which means they could be used for both backend management and public submission. That’s when we started writing Particletree.
As we wised up, ASP turned into PHP and we tried to narrow our focus to form building.
Y-combinator is an investment group which selects proposals for start-up ventures and funds them in a rather unconventional way. The development team must move for three months to Silicon Valley and survive for three months on $6k for each team member. That seems like it could be both a blessing and a curse. Can you tell us about some highlights and/or hardships that happened during your three months in the Y-combinator incubator?
Well, right before we went out there Ryan got Cat Scratch Fever. I won’t go too much into it, but it has something to do with swelling of the lymph nodes and apparently feels like somone kicking you in your precious place all over your body. This is a disease most common to the demographic consisting of 12 year-old girls. What it comes down to is only Ryan could get a disease like this. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really affect anything because he was over it by the time we got out there, but I like telling the story because Ryan is ridiculous and that’s is the flavor that always follows us around.
The blessing was that we were able to hole up in an apartment together and do nothing but craft Wufoo into existence. No girlfriends, no regular friends, no anything else. Because it’s Y Combinator and because it’s Silicon Valley, we met some pretty amazing people out there (CEOs, Investment Bankers, other entrepreneurs, Google/Yahoo employees, other young founders, plenty of reporters, etc.) and it lead to a round of Angel Investment in the end.
One of the reasons we moved back to the east coast in April, was because we ended up making too many friends and was spending way too much time in meetings. We went back to Tampa to basically hole up (for much cheaper living costs) and get our baby launched.
Did you ever question your idea? If so, how have you maintained your motivation and gotten through those times?
We never really questioned the idea. There’s plenty of people in the form building/ data entry space and so making money was never in doubt. People need an easy way to collect information over the web. The questions were always:
Would our interface be easy enough, simple enough, smart enough to reach out past the early adopters and techophiles? That’s something we worry about incessantly.
Motivation comes from lots of places but mostly from our users. Everyday we get emails from people loving what we do and telling us how easy and great the experience was. And as long as those outnumber the complaints and bugs, we’ll have no problems moving through the rough patches. Also, once you know that it’s either make Wufoo successful or go back to working in a cubicle…you find that you’re able to resurrect some pretty cool dormant powers that’s been inside yourself all your life–powers like staying awake forever and typing until you bleed.
What “gets your wig fried like a bad perm” (shameless WuTang allusion)?
I’m a designer so ugly bothers me.
For Chris, it’s an unhappy customer.
For Ryan, it’s inefficient code.
Thankfully, these quirks work out really well together in a startup.
What have you learned about yourself, both personally and professionally, since beginning work on Wufoo?
We can never go back to working in a cubicle. It’s just a side-effect of creating a startup with great people–you cannot be put back into the box. Once you work in a robe and cat slippers, that’s it. You become a broken person. And I want everyone to understand this: broken = awesome.
Best piece of advice ever given to you?
There are two mantras we live by around here:
1. You can’t stop the unstoppable.
2. Don’t try to be a hero.
The second one refers to parking at the mall.
You have three full-time people working at Wufoo. Who are they, what are their roles, and how do you keep a well-oiled machine? If you were to hire one more team member right now, what role would he/she play?
Ryan Campbell is our database wizard and JavaScript guru. He’s responsible for making our code efficient and making our interface fast and responsive. Ryan solves a good number of the technical support requests and bug fixes behind the scenes. He’s also single and runs 40 miles a week so if there are any hot sys admin ladies out there, email me and i’ll get you his digits.
Chris Campbell manifested our entire payment/invoicing system from scratch and wrote nearly all of the server side code code. This includes the helps ridiculous amount of error checking and validation scripts that goes through every piece of data coming through a Wufoo form. His specialty is customer evangelism, doing everything he can make our users very happy.
Kevin Hale is responsible for Wufoo’s interface design and user experience. He created all the wireframes and copy that shapes our application’s look and feel. If you love the way our Theme Builder handles styling forms, thank him for figuring out how it would all work. In addition to heckling Ryan, he loves making Wufoo beautiful and a lot of fun.
The best thing we have going for us is that there’s a lot to do and our responsibilities are clearly defined. That said, we’re all pretty well-rounded so everyone does a little bit everything whether it’s design, programming, support or marketing.
Since we’re in different cities (the brothers are in Tampa and Kevin is in Winston-Salem), we use a combination of instant messaging, video chat, SVN and a shared gMail account to coordinate all the action. We usually meet up about once a month face-to-face and Chris and Ryan go over to each other’s places about once a week to work out any coding issues that affects the both of them.
Is there an upcoming Wufoo feature that folks should know about?
Yes, we’re working on a really awesome Form Template Gallery where people can view, rate and use some of the most popular forms being created in Wufoo. With a single click they can just add a form to their account and start collecting data without having to having to build an idea from scratch.
To keep tabs on all the new features we’re working on, we recommend checking out the Roadmap we just put up on on our blog.
