They're lying about what it takes to build a $150M ARR business | Aytekin Tank | Jotform

Shamil Malachiyev: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of The Founder's Code podcast. Our guest today is the CEO and founder of Jotform, a company he bootstrapped and led to a valuation of over $2.5 billion. A Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff. Please welcome the one and only Aytekin Tank.

Aytekin Tank: Hello, Shamil. Thank you for having me on your show.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thanks for coming on the show, Aytekin. For the very few founders who might not know the scale at which you operate Jotform, could you give us a little bit of information about the level you're currently operating at?

Aytekin Tank: We have 35 million users. It's been almost two decades since I started Jotform — I started Jotform in 2006. We have over 700 employees and offices around the world, and 35 million users and still growing.

Shamil Malachiyev: Awesome. Can we start with what your life was like before starting Jotform?

Aytekin Tank: Yeah — I was working as a lowly developer, a programmer, for a media company in New York. I was doing all kinds of things. We had over 100 websites, and one of the things that I did a lot was creating forms for our editors for the websites. And that's actually — maybe that's your next question, but I'm just giving away the creation story — that's how I came up with the idea for Jotform. I was creating so many forms for our editors. They would run a contest, so I would create these application forms; I would create voting forms; they would require payments, so I would create payment forms — all kinds of forms. And while I was creating these forms, the problem was I hated creating them, so I tried to find a product that could help me with that. I couldn't find something, and that's how I knew that this could be a great product to work on. And I quit my job and I started Jotform.

But yeah — after I graduated school, I worked. I studied computer science in the US; I'm from Turkey. And after I graduated from college, I worked for that company for five years, and during that time I created lots of forms. As a founder, really understanding the market is really important, and that was a really good experience to understand the market.

Shamil Malachiyev: So the pain was really strong over the five years. Fantastic. And in previous communication, you've told me that during the time when you were just thinking about what kind of venture to do, you had a friend who you were going to do this together with. And I think that is something that a lot of people start with — they look at a friend, and the journey is usually hard, and they think: maybe we can do it together. But at times, the best decision you can make is to keep the relationship and then do it yourself. Could you tell us a little bit about your story?

Aytekin Tank: Yeah. So I had a friend, a close friend. He was also Turkish. He was actually ten years older than me — a systems engineer at a much larger corporation, much more experienced than me. But we got along well, and we had been talking about building our own startup, and we were ready to go together. At the last minute — right before we were going to start — I mean, we were so sure about each other that we hadn't even decided what we were going to build. I wanted to build Jotform. He wanted to do more consulting for other businesses — start with that and then do product later on. And that was OK for me. Even though we didn't see the same future, I was OK with that.

But the thing is, right before we started, he told me that his accountant had told him that 50-50 partnerships are bad. You should be doing 51% for one person and 49% for the other, in case there's a problem between the founders.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Because a lot of VCs tell me that when they look at a partnership where it's 50-50, there's usually a problem of communication — of who is the last person to make a decision. Because as a startup you have to make a lot of decisions, and if there are two of you at 50-50, who has the final word on which kinds of decisions? Was this something that you considered at that point as well?

Aytekin Tank: I have no idea what the original reason for that decision was, but he was sure of himself that this was the right approach. And for me, it was kind of like a vote of non-confidence. I felt like, this could be a trust issue — I don't feel good about this. And that's why I decided: no go. We either do 50-50 or we don't go. And we decided to split right at that point. That was really disappointing, and that was a crisis. Startups are full of these surprises, and that's why as a startup founder you get really strong — because you experience so many problems like this. Even before I started, I experienced this. So it was: should I continue with my path, or — OK, this didn't work out — should I not start? But I was committed. I was committed, and then I decided to go.

Shamil Malachiyev: What were the main doubts in your head? Because when you have a partner, you can share responsibilities. When you're left alone and you have to do it by yourself — what were the main problems inside your head that stopped you from going, "yeah, I'll just do it myself, it's going to be easy"? Did you have any doubts about yourself? Was it going to be a scary, tough world? How was it going to work out?

Aytekin Tank: Absolutely — this was already a scary journey, right? Going full-time on my own startup was already a scary journey, and now I had received this vote of no confidence, which just made it so much more scary. But I was so committed, because I had been preparing myself for a very long time. I had been reading all the books and all the blogs, and I was so ready that there was no way for me to back out. And I told myself: hey, I will try it for a few years, and if it doesn't work out, I will go back to working full-time. Because I had been prepping, I already had savings — enough savings to go for a long time. So: this is an adventure. I'm still in my 20s. I should just go forward with this and see what happens.

Shamil Malachiyev: So if you fail, it's not going to be a big issue — you can always find work if nothing works out.

Aytekin Tank: Yeah. It actually turned out to be a better approach, because one of the things that would have happened if we went together is that I would probably have spent most of my time on his consulting clients. He actually had clients — that's one of the reasons he said, "OK, I'm older, I'm more experienced, I'm leaving a job at double your salary" — he had all these reasons, and he already had clients lined up. But I didn't have any clients lined up. I was ready to go full-time on Jotform. So this actually turned out better, because instead of spending a lot of time with all these consulting clients, I just moved forward working 100% of the time on my product, on Jotform. I quit my job in August 2005, and I released Jotform in February 2006. So that's less than eight months. I released the first version and I had no distractions. I just focused on my product, and I was so busy I didn't even have doubts about — am I doing this right? Is it right to go alone? And I actually recommend going alone.

Shamil Malachiyev: You didn't have time to think about plan B. And what about the first months after you released? Did you expect — OK, now I either get a million users or this thing doesn't work? Or did you actually expect a very slow uptake?

Aytekin Tank: I actually expected slow uptake, because I had built other products while I was a student and while I was employed at that previous company. I had built all these open-source products, and I learned so much about marketing and working with customers. So I had low expectations. And because I had low expectations, I decided that I wasn't going to focus on sales or revenues — I was going to make it completely free. And not just completely free: I made it so that you could actually go and create your forms without even signing up. The first version of Jotform in 2006 — when you went to jotform.com, the form builder was right there. There was no landing page, there were no signup forms. The product was right there, because I wanted people to play with it, see how easy it is, experience it before signing up. And for a very long time it stayed like that, until one day one of our designers said, "OK, we have to have a homepage." And I told her: you have to convince me that a homepage is better than putting the product right on the homepage — this was many years later. And she did a version that actually won the A/B test, and then we switched to having a homepage. Because once people sign up, it's easier to engage them — you get their emails, you can send reminder emails, things like that.

But in the early days, it was all about keeping it free, keeping it easy to use, and getting as many people as possible onto the product so they could try it and mention it to others. That was my early way to gain users. At that time there weren't many products that had drag and drop, instant edits of text, or were single-page apps — Gmail had just come out, and in 2006 all these things were very new. So I used that angle to write to bloggers and news sites, to talk about how my product was different. My goal was to create a product that worked like installed software: you open it, it just launches, there's no landing page, you can start using it. And I used that angle to promote my product. In the early days I was only getting like 10 signups, 20 signups a day. It wasn't very big growth, but that was enough, because my goal was to get a lot of people to use my product, get their feedback and improve the product. And for the first year, it was all free.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell us a bit about the way you were thinking about the distribution channel? For everyone listening or viewing, you have to understand that this was pre-Instagram. Facebook was very raw and early at that time — all of these platforms were only just coming out. So you couldn't just run your Google Ads or Facebook Ads and have your product succeed. Which channels did you use?

Aytekin Tank: Yeah, in the early days it was all organic. There were no ads — and I also didn't have a budget to do ads. But there was also no social media. So I decided to launch my product on a forum called Business of Software. On Business of Software, everybody had their own products, so they were OK with listening to others talking about their products or launching them. On launch day I posted about my product, and there were so many people who were excited about it. They saw that this was a single-page app — technologically something new. Just like today, when you launch an AI product everybody is excited because AI is so exciting — at that time, that was the exciting thing. And there was so much great feedback. HubSpot founder Dharmesh was there — he also started HubSpot around that time — and he gave feedback too. And I also used the technology angle to write to lots of technology news websites to try to get coverage.

And it worked. I got some coverage, and all those things added up, and I started receiving some traffic — and that was the most important thing. If I get some traffic, and if I can turn some of it into active users, then the wheels start turning. By the time I released the second version of the product a year later, in 2007, I had like 15,000 free users. I released the premium version — it was only $9 per month — and as soon as I released it, I was able to convert 500 of them to paid users. And that was enough for me at that time. I hired my first employee. It was enough to prove that, OK, this is a real product and this product is going to grow. SaaS businesses are slow growth — in the early days it's very slow, people are just paying small monthly fees, and in the old days it was very hard to raise funds. But if your product is good, if you can keep people using your product, over time it keeps adding up. It snowballs over time.

Shamil Malachiyev: Geometrically. Do you still remember the day you were looking online and you saw that Google had launched Google Forms?

Aytekin Tank: Oh yeah. I think that was 2008 or 2010, around that time — I think it's 2008. Right around 2008, I think I only had like three employees, but Jotform was growing. My employees were mostly working on the product, but I was doing everything else. I was doing accounting, legal, HR, taking care of orders and stuff for the office. I was doing customer support from morning to night. I was busy with everything else. And that was a lesson for me about being a founder: as a founder, it's very important that you take your product to the future. When Google Forms came out, this was a decision moment for me, because I was spending so much time doing other things, but I wasn't actually spending time moving my product forward. And that's when I decided: OK, I've got to change things.

The two tools — the two weapons — I had at my disposal were delegation and automation. So because I was spending so much time on customer support, I went ahead and hired, I think it was nine support employees that year, from Upwork, and handed over all the support work I was doing. I saved so much time. And I also started automating everything else. If something I was working on was not important, I should be automating it — that was my philosophy — so that I could spend my time on things that are important. If I'm competing with Google, I have to be 10 times better than Google to be able to beat them, because they have so much distribution advantage. People use their products like Google Drive; they have so much traffic; they feature Google Forms right inside their products — on Google Sheets, you can see it. They provide it as a free product, just like we have a free version. But we had to be 10 times better than Google Forms, and to be able to do that, I had to delegate and automate everything, and I had to focus on improving the product.

And usually tough competitors are actually good. It was the same thing in the old days: we had a competitor called Wufoo, and they were made by famous designers. They had this newsletter with 150,000 subscribers; they were top leaders in the design space. Because we had a tough competitor there, that forced us to become better at design — at product design. Google Forms was something that made us better at growth as well. And later on, Typeform was another tough competitor, and that also helped us improve our product — provide another option in our product, for example single-page forms. Competitors actually make you stronger.

Out of Google Forms, I think there were two positive outcomes for me. One is that I focused on my product better. The other is that I became so good at automation that I was able to apply that knowledge to our company, to our team, even to our product — so that our product is really good at helping people automate things. Because forms are actually automation. When you fill out a form, instead of talking to the person who owns the form, you're filling out the form — you're automating that communication. And then there are all these steps that happen after you fill out the form. Say you're applying for something, making a request, registering for something, paying for something — there are all these other steps. And we decided: OK, let's help people automate the next steps as well. That helped us develop all these additional products — Jotform Sign, Jotform Apps, Jotform PDF Editor, a document generation product, Jotform Workflows. We built all these additional products so that people can automate the work they do after they receive the form submission.

And from all that knowledge, something else came out: the book about automation. I wrote the book Automate Your Busywork around 2022, 2023, and it actually became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. So yeah — competition is good. Usually when people ask — if I'm mentoring a startup and they ask me about a competitor — I say: Having good competitors is a really good thing. It's a blessing, because you can learn so much from them, and because you're trying to beat them, that just increases the bar for you. Then you work harder to get better and don't just rest on your laurels.

Shamil Malachiyev: So what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, as they say. And what I've noticed with a lot of founder friends of mine: when they try to delegate some of the initial functions to focus more on strategic roles, they find it hard, because they tend to think nobody can do it better than they do. How do you actually delegate in a way that ensures it's done to that standard — or even better than you would have done it yourself?

Aytekin Tank: Delegation is really hard. One thing I learned about delegation is that it also depends on the people. For example, if you have a junior employee and you just tell them, "OK, this is my goal," they're just going to get confused. In those cases you kind of need to micromanage them, just to put them on track about what they need to do and what they need to learn. But if you have a seasoned employee with long experience, if you try to micromanage them, you're just going to bore them — you're actually going to lower their performance. But if you can give them the goal and all the resources they need, they're going to perform really well.

For me, over the years, what I really learned is that my title is founder. I'm founder and CEO, but my real title is founder, because you cannot replace that title. You cannot just hire a founder — you have to be the founder of the company. This is important, because people assume that the founder title is about the past: OK, you founded the company, in the past. But I think the founder title is evergreen. It actually applies to the future. Because I ask myself the question: how should I found the future Jotform? How should I be the founder of the future of my company, of my team, of my product? What should I do to redesign it? That's how I look at it.

And if I'm lost in details — and I made that mistake multiple times — I would just go and spend my time doing all these meetings about everything. Instead of focusing on the one thing that's really critical for our company, I would do everything. I would do HR. I really enjoy office planning — working with architects.

Shamil Malachiyev: Physical space in the software world.

Aytekin Tank: There's nothing as enjoyable as working with architects to design a beautiful office. I love it. It's so cool — it's another form of design. But the thing is, when I did all these different things, maybe I was being a CEO, but I wasn't being a founder. I was not doing the thing that I should be doing the most — and the other things can be done by other people. For example, if you hire a really great HR person — I made really bad HR hires for a very long time until I found the best one. I think I hired three or four wrong hires before I found the good head of HR. I made the same mistake with sales: I hired three different salespeople and none of them worked out, and the fourth one I hired actually worked out.

Shamil Malachiyev: What was the main difference? Because HR is a very important function for a founder to have — that's the person who fills the positions that help you delegate your work. What was the difference between the three HR hires that were bad and the one that was good?

Aytekin Tank: I think it's about what your company needs, and whether the person you hire can actually do that — has the experience and the skills to do that. The main skill we always lacked was recruiting. It was really hard to find and hire good people; we would make recruiting mistakes. That went on until we found someone who was really good at recruiting, because she had experience working for large companies hiring lots of people, and had learned from really good people. All the people we hired before — maybe they were good at something, but it wasn't what we needed.

It was the same thing with sales. We had built this enterprise product and we needed a salesperson. All the people we hired had experience selling a product that already sells. But then we hired someone who knew how to start a sales team — how to jumpstart sales. And I was so unsure of myself that when I was talking to him, I told him: OK, I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't want to fire another person. So let's do a three-month project, and if we succeed, we can turn it into employment. He was OK with that. And he hit the target — an ambitious target — because he had experience working with startups in the past, getting them to their first early sales. Because we had this new enterprise product, he was able to do a good job.

Both people are still with our company, by the way — the sales hire and the HR hire — and they've grown. Now they're both managing large teams. They're still successful, but they were successful initially as well. So it was probably about my skill. Because I wasn't good at HR or sales — I had no idea how to do sales — I wasn't able to hire good people in those areas. Because I was a good programmer, a good developer, I knew how to find good developers. Because I had grown my product, I understood marketing and growth, so I was able to hire good people in those areas, or grow people. But in the areas where I had no idea, I wasn't able to hire good people either — because I lacked the skills to see who was good and who was not.

Shamil Malachiyev: And during those times when you were uncertain of what to do next — whether your decision was a good one or not — were there people like mentors you could turn to, ask for advice, brainstorm ideas with?

Aytekin Tank: I don't think I had any mentors in that area — and that's why I try to be a mentor now; I mentor a lot of startups. It's really hard, because SaaS and internet businesses were so new that, especially when I was starting out, you couldn't find mentors — there weren't many companies that were successful themselves. So I had to learn everything myself. But my main mentors were books. I read a lot of books. And I was obsessed with Apple, because Apple had been creating all these great products, and I was really curious about how Apple developed such great products with great design and great execution. I read all the books I could find in that area.

One book I would recommend is called Creative Selection. That book is written by someone who worked with Steve Jobs — who designed the first iPhone software keyboard and the first version of the Safari browser. That book taught me a lot about how Apple actually worked, and I changed a lot about the way we work at our company from the things I learned from it. Apple did a lot of reviews, for example, and I tried to do more and more reviews. If I'm focused on one area — for example, right now I'm focused on AI; we're working on Jotform AI, and it involves all of Jotform's products. There are like 20 different product teams working on different parts of the AI product, and I meet with them every week and give them feedback. Weekly, regular review meetings and feedback — that's something I learned from Apple.

And if you don't have mentors: blogs and books. I was a big reader of Eric Ries's blog — before he wrote The Lean Startup, I was reading his blog, and I learned a lot and applied all that knowledge to my business. So definitely books and blogs — and these days, podcasts and YouTube are a great way to develop yourself.

Shamil Malachiyev: Yeah, that's what I do to learn — I just find great people and listen to everything they have. Every time I go to the gym or for a walk, there's always a podcast, and I'm absorbing all of those thoughts. Just a personal question: what do you think about Steve Jobs' leadership style? People say he was quite tough with people — people were scared to get in an elevator with him — but at the same time, he got the job done. And I think Elon Musk has a slightly similar leadership style, where he doesn't wait for mediocrity: if you're mediocre, bye bye — I only hire the best, the strongest, the most hardworking. What's your view on that? Because some companies say you have to be more lenient — help people grow, let them make mistakes.

Aytekin Tank: I think he was tough. He was tough, but he wasn't bullying people just to bully them. He cared so much about the product — he cared so much about design and product, and he didn't accept something halfway. That's why he was so tough. And I feel like that approach really worked well. Sometimes when you ask people to do something impossible, they actually do it. You all think, "OK, this is not possible" — but when someone asks you to do it and you try to figure it out, you figure it out. I think that was his approach.

From the book Creative Selection — we don't apply this, but one of the things they do at Apple, which is really brutal, is they run competitions. Multiple teams work on the same product, and only one of them is selected. The others have just wasted their time — they throw their products in the trash. Whoever has the best solution wins. In the keyboard example, I think there were like 20 different people or teams working on finding a keyboard solution, and the author of the book was on the winning team. They were able to find the best solution because they didn't accept something that only works a little bit — they pushed the team to do their best. It's brutal, but life is brutal. In the wild, if you are an animal in Africa, you're going to be eaten easily if you are not tough enough.

It's not in my personality to be like Steve Jobs, but I also try to give people projects that are impossible. I tell them: this is impossible, but just try to do it. And most of the time, they actually do it. If you don't give them that permission to do the impossible, they don't try. But if you ask them to do something impossible, they sometimes do it — and if they can't, they still come up with creative solutions. I think it's fun to try to accomplish something hard.

Shamil Malachiyev: I love this frame of mind. And talking about the brutal realities of being a CEO and founder — in 2012... So, many of us have our domains registered with GoDaddy, and none of us expect that anything might happen to the domain name. You received an email, right? Can you take us through that?

Aytekin Tank: Yeah, sure. We had just had a hack day — a hackathon — and we were about to leave the office. I was checking my emails before leaving, and I saw this email from GoDaddy that said: we have been asked to suspend your domain name, and you can call this agent about it. And there was this Secret Service phone number. I was about to have a heart attack — Secret Service? What's going on? Very scary. And our domain name is going down. So obviously I called the number, but it was just voicemail. I left a voicemail saying: we are a form builder, we host like 2 million forms, so whatever the problem is, we are ready to help resolve it, but you shouldn't suspend the domain name.

Shamil Malachiyev: Straight into the movies. "We don't pose a threat to national security."

Aytekin Tank: Since I had just left a voicemail, it was: we are losing our domain name — what should we do? We started brainstorming with the team. First: let's make sure the forms are still working. We had another domain name, jotform.net, so let's make sure jotform.net fully works as a backup domain that people can use. And then I decided: I have to email everyone — I have to email our users, because we are going down, and if we stay silent, it's just terrible. So we made sure jotform.net was working — it took us a few hours to get that right — and then I prepared an email. I couldn't even say "Secret Service"; I think I said something like "a government organization" is suspending our domain name, so your forms may stop working — please switch whatever you're using on your website to jotform.net. And I sent this email. Obviously our customers weren't happy about it. At that point it was very late, so I went home and I went to sleep. You wouldn't think I could sleep like that, but I actually slept — I guess I was so tired.

Shamil Malachiyev: Mental exhaustion.

Aytekin Tank: The next morning when I woke up, I felt like I hadn't slept at all — my head was full of stress, and I just wanted to clear my head. The thing I do every morning is look at Hacker News — maybe some people don't know it; it's a news site, a forum, about startups and technology. I opened it, and we were at the top of Hacker News. It said the government is suspending Jotform's domain name. And the thing is, I had been so open about it — I had said they were probably suspending us because of one of the forms people created, because we had been dealing with phishing for a long time, so I was pretty sure it was phishing.

With the Secret Service, people always assume their job is protecting the president, but they actually have two duties: protecting the president and protecting the currency. And protecting the currency means banks. So it turns out, if there's a bank phishing form, things like that — actually, to this day, we don't know what the cause of the Secret Service request was. But this created a lot of angry people — and people weren't angry at us; people were angry about a government shutting down a domain name because of user-generated content. It's kind of like shutting down Twitter today because someone made a bad tweet. And that discussion started turning into news. They started contacting me — TechDirt especially was really interesting. We were on Wired, Ars Technica, TechDirt and many other sites.

I think the suspension lasted about two days. The TechDirt editor told me: I talked to the Secret Service press person, and they're going to release your domain name. And then our domain was released. I think this was thanks to the people caring about it and talking about it, and then the news organizations caring about it. Otherwise, getting the domain name back might have taken many months of trying to do it legally. And one of the things I learned that day: I need to have a lawyer. I didn't care about those things before — I just cared about growing my business and improving my product. I was so focused on my work that I forgot about being legally strong, having a lawyer. If I'd had a lawyer, I would have just contacted them; instead, I was fighting fires and trying to get everything working. And we were lucky because we were big — if we were small, we wouldn't have gotten our domain name back.

So that was a lesson. We increased our efforts on phishing as well. Phishing and spam are things you have to deal with once you reach scale, especially in the forms business. It gets easier now because you have AI on your side — but the bad people also have AI. It was a big lesson for us: invest in being more legally prepared, and do a better job taking care of phishing. It was a learning lesson, but it didn't kill us, so it made us stronger.

Shamil Malachiyev: What I notice a lot is that once a company starts growing — maybe over 80 to 120 employees — founders sometimes say, and sometimes shareholders force this: "I'm not enjoying this as much, it's a lot of management. We'll hire a CEO who's good at structuring, managing, operations, who's going to take the company to the next tier." But you decided: I'm going to continue building the structure. How did you ensure the efficiency? How do you ensure the company stays just as innovative — because the competitors are not going away — as you grow?

Aytekin Tank: That was later on — around 2014, we were about 15 employees. Before Jotform, I had no experience managing employees. I assumed that in big companies you just give everyone different jobs and they do them — that was actually how it worked when I was at the media company. But the problem was, when we reached around 15 people, we weren't doing anything correctly. It was chaos. We were doing lots of things, but we weren't doing them well. We didn't know what we were doing. I was trying to prioritize things and give people the right projects, but project management was really difficult — just trying to get people to work with each other. There was a designer doing their own work... I didn't do a good job. And I thought about why this wasn't working.

I started looking at the early days, when we were around five people and we were so efficient, so good. I asked myself: what was different? The thing that was different was that when we were five people, we were small, so we weren't trying to do so much. We were working on a single project — say, a new version of Jotform — and we were constantly talking about that project. When we took breaks, when we went to lunch, we would go together. We were in this small office space with a whiteboard, we could hear each other in the same small room, and we could just start talking about these things and make decisions.

There was something right about that. When we reached 15 people, when people took breaks, they didn't talk about what they were working on — they talked about what's on TV, because you had no idea what other people were doing; you were all working on different projects. And we didn't go to lunch together, because with 15 people it's hard — you're not going to talk about your project; you're going to have all these separate discussions about different things. So I thought: OK, that small-team environment — and I was reading about cross-functional teams, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries's blog, and I learned so much from that — instead of having this 15-person team where everyone worked on different things, we're going to divide it into three small teams.

Right at that time we were moving to new office space, so I hired an architect to design office spaces similar to the one we had when we were five people. Everybody had their desk, we had a whiteboard, we had our own space, and the door could close so we could talk to each other. Small office spaces — we didn't want them to be claustrophobic, so they were mostly glass, with maybe one wall with a whiteboard on it — and each could only hold six people. I divided the team into small cross-functional teams, and the next thing was: I gave each team a single project. I said, this is your project, this is what you're going to work on, go do it. You are like an independent startup. Make your own decisions.

And that worked. Now, inside those walls, there was a team that worked together, functioned together, made decisions — and they were cross-functional. They had their own designers, their own front-end developers, back-end developers — everything they needed to make decisions and execute them. That approach worked so well that I was able to grow Jotform to its current size the same way. Today, Jotform is a team of teams. We still have these small office spaces — now we have so many of them — and all of our teams work this way. I think Spotify has a similar approach, with small cross-functional teams, and it works so well.

One thing I added was a team lead — that was important. Another thing I added was weekly reviews: instead of letting a team just go off and make decisions entirely by themselves, we give them feedback every week. When we were smaller, I gave that feedback; as we've grown, department heads or other directors give it. Today I only give feedback to the teams I actually work with — right now I'm working on the AI project, where about 20 product teams are working, and I give them feedback every week. Usually 15-20 minute feedback sessions. That helps them complete something, we discuss whatever they built, and they keep building — and with user feedback, they improve their products.

Shamil Malachiyev: And how does your motivation change as a founder? I can imagine when you're just starting, you want to build something big, make a lot of money, have a great life, feel important, actually make an impact in the world. But now you've built all of that. You have a company with revenue over like 150 million dollars a month — and wait, oh yeah, sorry —

Aytekin Tank: Not a month. Yeah — we actually don't announce our revenue. There are some estimations on the internet, but we don't actually announce it. But yeah, it's not a month. Definitely not.

Shamil Malachiyev: And I'm just thinking — a lot of people think: that's the point I want to get to, and then I'll just do something else. What keeps you motivated to keep building, to keep at it? There must be some transformations — your initial motivation is already fed, and you're sitting there trying to find something to restart the fire inside you, to keep going to the next milestone, the next goal. How do you keep those internal dialogues going?

Aytekin Tank: Deciding what to do next, right? I ask myself two questions — and I think every founder of a business has to ask themselves these questions: What is the biggest bottleneck for my company today? And what's the biggest opportunity for my company today? One of those questions has an answer that's probably more important, and I pick just one of them. A few years ago, the answer was quality — I decided that one of Jotform's bottlenecks was that quality wasn't good enough, so we needed to focus on quality. And these days, I'm focused on the biggest opportunity for Jotform today: AI. AI provides so many opportunities, because AI is like adding a person to your product — a real person, a service. You can turn your product into a service. If you hire a consulting company, someone is actually working for you; if you use a product, you don't have a person on the other end. But when you have AI, it can work like a person. Now you can do things that were not possible. That's why I see this as a big opportunity, and I'm just focused on that.

So I force myself to make a decision, usually once a year: what's the biggest opportunity, or the biggest bottleneck, for our company? And whatever decision I make, I make sure I spend all of my time on it. That requires having a good executive team, so that I don't have to deal with HR issues or operational issues. If I have a good executive team, and a good COO who makes sure anything the executives miss is taken care of, then I can focus on a single thing — and that's what I do.

For example, because I'm focused on AI right now, I'm even doing a podcast. I have this AI Agents podcast, and every episode — the best way to learn something is to teach it, right? I pick a topic that I'm not really good at, so I have to prepare for the podcast; I learn it, and then I present it. This forces me to learn. For example, I covered Notion AI recently, and then I covered n8n agents and n8n's workflow builder, because we have similar features within Jotform and I wanted to learn from those products. So I cover them, I talk about them, I even demo these products — and that opens up my creativity: why don't we do this at Jotform? If I was doing all these different things, I wouldn't have time for that. If you think about it, doing a podcast feels like a waste of time — it's not a huge growth channel for us; it doesn't bring in many Jotform users — but it forces me to learn about AI and get better at it. If I can pick a single thing and focus on it completely, I have to find ways to actually focus on it. It's like time-boxing, but more like focus-boxing: sticking to a single focus. This allows me to get better at it and think about it.

I even force myself to give a speech every week. We have this demo day at Jotform — hundreds of people attend, and people who aren't in the same time zone watch it later, so the whole company watches it. All of our teams go there, and for five minutes each they demo what they're working on. Every Friday we have this one-hour demo day, and it starts with me making a speech for ten minutes. That speech forces me to talk about what we're doing — building momentum about what we're working on, why I think something is important. It helps me focus my thinking, and in some cases even make decisions, because I talk about why we made these decisions, and that helps everyone understand why we made them. And I learned this the hard way. For a long time I was just doing everything, and I was enjoying doing everything. If you want to do something for a long time, you have to enjoy it — and the way to enjoy it is if you're growing, if you're learning, if you're doing different things. This is my way to enjoy the work, enjoy being a founder — to reinvent ourselves, learn new things, and apply them to our product.

Shamil Malachiyev: I'm loving how you're a man of action. A lot of founders are like, "oh, I should write a book one day" — you just went and did it. A lot of people are like, "hmm, in order to learn this, I should start a podcast" — you just went and did it. I meet a lot of people who love to talk about the potential, about the great thing that could happen — but instead of talking, just go and do it.

Aytekin Tank: Exactly. The book was also a way for me to focus my thinking about automation. I was unlucky in one way: I wrote a book about automation right before AI blew up. Right when I released it, everybody was talking about AI, and my book wasn't about AI. But I think the principles still apply, and all the things I learned and clarified in my head while writing the book actually helped me build a better AI strategy as well. That's another instance of using focus to improve yourself — forcing yourself to write a book about a topic is a great way to learn that topic. The best way to learn it is to teach it. And the automation flywheel I talk about in the book — all those principles still apply when we're designing our product with AI. The same thinking, the same ideas.

Shamil Malachiyev: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I'm pretty sure a lot of founders listening to this will benefit tremendously, because it's so rare to see somebody leading a company for such a long time, admitting the changes, growing as a person and as a leader, and taking so much action — actually doing stuff. I really appreciate you. I hadn't heard about your podcast, and it's probably the next thing I'm going to do for two hours, because I believe a lot of people are going to benefit from learning about the world of AI automation workflows. Any last words for the founders listening to us today?

Aytekin Tank: I don't think I had a chance to talk about the 50-50 rule — I could talk about that a little bit. When I mentor startups, that's what I talk about most of the time, because they usually make mistakes there — the mistakes I also made. My 50-50 rule is: as a startup founder, you should be spending half of your time developing your product and half of your time growing your product. And you should be doing both at the same time. One way to do that: one day you're focused on developing your product, the next day you focus on growth. The reason is that it's a cycle — a feedback loop. If you don't have any users, you cannot improve your product, because the only way to improve your product is to see people use it, get their feedback, see where they failed, improve things for them, and implement the features they're requesting or fix the confusions they're having. And the only way to grow a product is to have a good product — because if you don't have a good product, people might try it and then leave.

Many startups I mentor have a problem with this. For example, there's the technical founder who's really good at building a great product. They know all about AI, they graduated from amazing schools, they worked at Google or somewhere in Silicon Valley. But they spend years and years building a product without user feedback, and when it comes out, it's confusing — it has too much. If they had built an MVP and gotten feedback from users, they would have built a better product. There's a book — The Lean Startup; Ries talks about this in great detail. The second example is the founder who's really good at sales, growth and marketing, but doesn't spend enough time building a great product. When I talk to them, they've just made a great big sale — a big logo, amazing. But when I talk to them a couple of months later, the customer left; they didn't really find the product useful. I hear the same thing again and again. The problem is they don't have product-market fit, because they're not spending enough time with their product.

You are going to lack one of those skills — it's impossible to have both equally. In my case, I was really good at the technical side, but I wasn't that great at the marketing and growth side. And I learned it — I spent a lot of time learning it. So that's my advice to founders: make sure you're spending your time on both aspects, and actually time-box it, so that you're not just doing the things that come easy to you, but working on the hard things that actually make a difference. That would be my last advice. I really appreciate your questions — they were amazing. Thank you for a great conversation.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thanks so much. And for your 50-50 rule — everybody listening, make sure you listen to it again two times. I personally made the exact same mistake back in 2012, right after my master's. I went in thinking: I'm going to build a product, I know what it should look like. And I was building something huge without ever talking to the schools, the universities — the people who would be my users. I thought I knew it. And so many of my very technically oriented friends just sit and work on the product, because it's scary. It's scary to go out into the world and risk hearing "I don't like it, it's not my problem, it's not really solving it for me." But it should be OK — a lot of people will not like a product the first time it comes out. That's just what it is. It's not a risk, it's not an if — they will not like a lot of it, and your job is to make sure that every month it's a bit better. With years, you get a lot more people falling in love with the product. So don't be scared to go out there and hear that the product's shit — because that's how it starts. And I think your story is a big inspiration for a lot of founders.

Aytekin Tank: Thank you, Shamil.

Shamil Malachiyev: Thanks so much.