$7000/Month Software In A Crowded Market

Harvey Carpenter is the founder of Growform, a form builder which is earning $7K/month 🤑

The origin story, via a recent interview…

I was working in a marketing team. We were spending [$1000’s] on Google ads and Facebook ads. One day we hired an agency [to help] get more leads… and they basically split out our long boring form into multiple steps… this was like 5+ years ago… 

[I remember wishing] there was a form builder that just let me do nice multi-step forms and I kind of put that idea back in my head… three years later, when I actually knew how to code, I built my first form.

Harvey says his first customers came through Google ads…

I was spending a few hundred dollars a month just bidding on words like “form builder” and that was really valuable to collect those first few customers and learn some lessons.

And to be able to say… if I invest X amount, I actually have a kind of repeatable engine here.

I would definitely advocate that approach and If you know a little bit about Google ads or Facebook ads

Harvey was only earning about $500/month from Growform when he took out a $25,000 loan and quit his job 😱

His reasoning…

If you’re building a form builder or a landing page builder or an email tool or something [complex] like that, you really do need 6-12 months to work on it.

So [quitting my job] enabled me to go full time and basically build the tool because you’re just constantly getting bugs in or it doesn’t do X, it doesn’t do Y. So it just let me build for a year or so.

A ballsy move, but it paid off 👍

Sounds like the “repeatable engine” of Google ads > paying customers was a big factor there, giving Harvey the confidence that he could steadily increase revenue over time.

But the most amazing thing to me here: Growform has grown to $7000/month despite there being so many other form builders on the market.

And I believe Harvey only launched the business in 2020 🚀

He was asked about this in the interview…

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good point. And it’s kind of a valuable learning lesson for indie hackers, because you’ve had guests who are making good MRR from basically doing the same thing over and over again.

When you look at what those [other] form builders do…

Typeform does one question at a time very well. It is brilliant for surveys.

Tally is a really nice, clean, Notion-like experience.

Growform is great for lead generation.

So it seems the key is to focus on some functionality that bigger competitors are neglecting, and make that the core of your product.

With that in mind, keep an eye out for poor or missing functionality in popular software that you use. 

Could be an opportunity there 😉

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