Y Combinator’s Kevin Hale shares lessons learned from Wufoo

Kevin Hale, Y Combinator partner and co-founder of Wufoo

Online forms may not sound like the most exciting business in the world. However, according to Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale, they are something that nearly every online business needs. They also present unique challenges in terms of a great user experience. Hale joined us today for Tech in Asia Singapore 2015. He took to the stage on day one of the two-day event to share the story of his early startup.

Today, Hale is a partner at Y Combinator, which provides seed funding to startups from all over the world. Hale works with the accelerator’s portfolio of companies on user experience design, product development, and customer support (Disclosure: Y Combinator invests in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page).

In 2006, he co-founded Wufoo. The site was one of the earliest Y Combinator funded startups. Wufoo is an online form builder that was ranked by Jakob Nielson as one of the best application UIs of 2008. Wufoo was later acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011 for US$35 million after only raising a total of US$118,000.

Hale says in the beginning, he hated making forms and surveys for other people. For him and his co-founders Chris and Ryan Campbell, the idea for Wufoo came about because most people were lazy when it came to building data-collecting forms for their businesses. The process is despised by most mid-level managers so much that they often simply pass the task on to a subordinate.

Hale says:

When I entered Y Combinator, they gave me a T-shirt in the beginning of our program that said: Make something people want. Then when Wufoo got acquired by SurveyMonkey, I got a black shirt that said: I made something people want […] I know it sounds silly, but I will always be really fond of that memory.

Remain disciplined

A startup should be consistently difficult all the way from ideation to exit, Hale advises. He suggests that truly great founders are the ones that say: “It never got easier to run the business, but in the end, we were able to remain disciplined.”

Hale says that during the year after he started Wufoo, the company’s business grew primarily by word-of-mouth. According to him, the trick was to use Wufoo to help people with whatever they needed to get done. For example, if an influential person had to give a presentation, Hale and his co-founders would go out of their way to help them prepare it with Wufoo.

“All we had to do was get a few super fans,” explains Hale. “We tried to be as human as possible […] and we wanted to make the people who are our champions looked awesome to their peers. As a result, they then made sure that people knew about Wufoo.”

See: Y Combinator wants Asian startups to apply for its accelerator

From the beginning, Wufoo also made sure to create a great user experience for the business. Users could format their finished forms as embeddable iframes or as separate web pages. Wufoo users could receive responses via email or RSS. The data could then be filtered and displayed in the reports section where administrators could easily control the look and feel of reports for the viewers. Hale wanted to focus on making Wufoo simple, intuitive, and most importantly, “human,” from the get-go.