How obsessing over our customers (not competitors) got us over 1m new signups

The internet is a weird place.

Anyone who operates an online business has likely experienced their fair share of haters, trolls, and general unpleasantness. And after 12 years of running JotForm, I’ve learned to take things lightly.

But last year, I read a comment that did make me do a double take. Our design director found it in a discussion thread on Designer News.

After months of hard work, we’d just launched a new product and were excited to hear people’s reactions. The top commenter quoted the first two lines of our about page (which says the company was founded in 2006), then wrote:

“So how come [this particular competitor] is more popular? I never heard of you guys.”

That comment was, well, a tiny bit annoying. But I could also understand it. Not that many people have heard of us. As a bootstrapped company, we’ve never received the kind of media attention that comes with a big funding round.

The startup world can feel like one big popularity contest, and from that perspective, we were losing.

Should we be trying to change the opinions of non-customers (like that Designer News commenter)? Should we follow the lead of our younger, cooler opponents by chasing trends? And if we tried to mimic our competitors, would we risk alienating our users?

We decided to stay in our own, lesser-known lane—innovating on our own terms, at our own pace, with our customers (not our competitors) in mind. And it worked. We got over 1 million signups in the year that followed.

Here’s what we learned along the way.

Ask first

OK, so you’ve added a great new feature to your product (or made a change). But that doesn’t mean you can just foist it on users without any warning.

Changes can come as a shock and put customer loyalty at risk.

We do our best to avoid this by relying on two key strategies:

1. Release new versions or significant feature changes to a small test group of real users first.
2. Establish a clear way of measuring user reactions. This could be a number, a behavior, or another metric that shows how customers really feel about the change.

We put this into practice when we developed our newest product, JotForm Cards.

Choice first, change second

Customer support as a secret weapon

Strong competitors make you stronger