Lights. No cameras. Action. Maybe David Foster Wallace wasn’t jesting when he said video calls would be more trouble than they’re worth.
Telling a business partner you’d be competing with them would never be easy, especially when both businesses still needed to work together.
So imagine a young Bill Gates telling Steve Jobs that Microsoft was building Windows and competing directly—on an operating system level, at any rate—with the Macintosh.
“We had to take a walk,” relayed Gates decades later to Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson. Jobs started the meeting taking Gates to task for building what he saw as a rip-off of Apple’s work—where Gates countered both companies had worked off Xerox’ innovation. The meeting was going nowhere. And so Jobs had to get out of the office, asked Gates to go for a walk. Maybe it was the clean air, the open sky, the grounding effect of nature. But it worked: “That was when he began saying things like, ‘Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing,” recalled Gates. Crisis averted, at least momentarily.
***
In the intervening years, as Jobs’ vision of a friendly computer and Gates’ of a computer on every desk morphed into today’s always-on computing, we all left the office. We took our word processing and coding, emails and chats, Photoshop and spreadsheets, into coffee shops and lunch queues. We’d think of things that needed done and do them all, anywhere.
All, that is, except meetings. Simply by virtue of computers and phones including cameras, video calls became the standard for remote meetings. It’s harder if anything to start a group voice call today; video reigns supreme in the workplace.
Thus my momentary surprise when, sometime in 2017, my editor started our weekly 1-1 meeting in Slack. My phone buzzed with a Slack notification, I tapped it, and seconds later I was on what seemed like a phone call—voice, with no video. Slack, thoughtfully enough, starts voice calls by default. Video’s a button tap away if you need it, but you might not. I brought the phone to my ear and we chatted about work and goals, no video or even headphones needed.
Maybe we didn’t need video calls for everything. Maybe audio is enough. And maybe it could get us over our collective Zoom fog.
This is what you want, this is what you get.
AT&T's original video phone, the MOD I, from 1964.
AT&T's original video phone, the MOD I, from 1964.
“Through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles,” predicted the original Tesla in 1926, imagining a future smartphone small enough, “a man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
The future came, sure enough. We got Twitter instead of flying cars, but video calls came almost exactly as they’d been imagined. If phone calls had revolutionized communications, video calls would surely do even more.
We were so excited about video calls being possible, we collectively rushed into a future that neglected audio calls, with video being the default way to talk in Skype, Messenger, FaceTime, and more. “In some ways we kind of skipped over audio on the internet,” Racket founder Austin Petersmith remarked to Protocol’s David Pierce. “The amount of experimentation of video is orders of magnitude more than audio, and I think that's because there's a tendency to go toward the highest-fidelity thing available.”
When every phone comes with a camera, surely we should use it.
Or perhaps not. Around the same time IBM added the first webcams to laptops in 1996, author David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jestimagined a world where we’d try video calls, then decide they were more trouble than they were worth.
Traditional phone calls, to Wallace, were brilliant for the information they withheld, the fiction they created. “Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you,” wrote Wallace. We could do anything, look any way you wanted, and the person on the other end of the line would be none the wiser.
Video calls, he predicted, “rendered the fantasy insupportable.” We’d had to perform for the call, act like we were looking at the speaker, look presentable at the last moment. “There was … no answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls.” And perhaps that's what we liked about phone calls all around, without realizing it.
And so, in Infinite Jest’s imagined world, humanity would switch to video calls for a year, then quickly shift 90% of calls back to audio-only.
After a year where everything important has been held over video calls, it feels like Wallace may have not been too far off the mark.
Mirror, mirror on the screen
Searches for "Zoom Fatigue" peaked the end of March 2020, as much of the world went into lockdown and seemingly every interaction was suddenly over video calls.
It turns out, it’s tiring, being on camera all day.
You have to look at the camera, fake eye-contact with the speaker. But “in real life, how often do you stand within three feet of a colleague and stare at their face? Probably never,” surmised Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy in the Harvard Business Review. “Having to engage in a ‘constant gaze’ makes us uncomfortable — and tired.”
You have to perform, keep up appearances, seem engaged and attentive. “When you're on a video conference, you know everybody's looking at you; you are on stage, so there comes the social pressure and feeling like you need to perform. Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful.” As the BBC quoted INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri: “You cannot relax into the conversation naturally.”
And for all your effort, tech too often gets in the way. Your mic may not work, your video call app might crash, a siren might go by right as you need to talk. Even a slow internet connection can make you come across worse to your colleagues, as a 2014 study by Berlin Institute of Technology researchers found that when the audio is delayed more than 1.2 seconds, participants “are perceived less attentive, extraverted and conscientious.”
You’re performing. You’re trying to decipher unclear facial cues. Add context collapse—where every event happens in the same space, without the familiar separation between work and leisure spaces—and your brain never has time to turn off. All that together gives us “Zoom fog,” the mental blurriness after one too many video calls, and the dread of needing to do more.
Call me. Video, maybe.
And so, just as remote meetings are more common than ever, Infinite Jest's prediction that we might “actually prefer the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all” is new trend in the remote startup world, at least.
“Video makes many conversations worse,” Tweeted Basecamp CEO Jason Freed, after decades of experience leading one of the first remote companies.
He’s not alone. The Gumroad team is switching meetings to audio talks after founder Sahil Lavingia says they found “Video is largely unnecessary.” “We almost never use our cameras for internal meetings,” shared @MikeRaia in a Capiche discussion about video call defaults, where @briana9 mentioned “My team is mostly video off.”
Hiten Shah—founder of CrazyEgg, KISSmetrics, and FYI—shared that “having remote meetings while walking” and “sitting in nature during a meeting” were some of the things he does to make remote work more healthy, tips one suspects Jobs might have enjoyed. You could walk during video meetings, at the risk of making your team seasick—switch to audio calls, though, and you can move as much as you please.
You could even take it to the logical extreme and drop meetings altogether. Todoist founder Amir Salihefendić mentioned that his favorite company perk is “Async-first. This enables you to live wherever and work when it suits you.” You could share your thoughts in Slack or record them in tools like Yac, and rethink if meetings are even necessary. Or, go in the other direction, and use something like Discord with always-on audio chat in the background to talk whenever you want, spontaneously.
Whether spontaneously, location-independent meetings are what your team needs, or working more async, audio’s part of making it happen. You can turn off the camera, relax a bit more on calls, and think more about what’s being said and less about how you look while you’re saying it. You could take a walk, or take the call from wherever you happen to be at the moment, when video's no longer a requirement.
It's part of the enduring appeal of radio shows and podcasts—you can listen and learn while doing other things, without being glued to a screen for yet another hour. Where video ties us down, audio lets us do more, frees us to work the way that fits best without performing for the camera. We can talk on Facetime Audio and Slack calls, all with just a microphone.
Originally published on the now-defunct Racket blog on February 23, 2021. Microphone photo by Jukka Aalho via Unsplash. Mod I video phone photo via Bonhams.
Fall down the rabbit hole. Focus intently on one thing. That's how you get remembered.
It’s not just anyone who would want to beta-test the first production electric sports car, much less pay $100,000 and wait years for the privilege of doing so.
Yet that was the point. Tesla’s first car wasn’t designed for everyone. It was designed to make a splash. You might not buy it, but you wouldn’t forget it.
As CEO Elon Musk wrote in 2006, Tesla’s “secret” plan was to “Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car.”
The challenge wasn’t so much in building an electric car; that’d been done well over a hundred years before the original Tesla was even born.
“If you’re trying to build something that’s truly new, you can’t start off by trying to reach a mass market,” said Carver Mead in a New Yorker piece about innovation. Musk would agree.
The challenge was focus.
You just have to say a single thing.
It’s tempting to go big from the start, to make or write or say something that’d appeal to everyone. Do that, though, and you make something everyone’s ok with but no one really wants.
So the UNIX philosophy advised early programmers to “Write programs that do one thing and do it well.” Writer David Perell advises that “writing comes alive at the extremes,” in explaining why to write for an audience of one. “There isn’t one chair for everyone,” says app designer Andy Allen, as explanation for on why we need no boring software.
Whiplash wasn’t made for everyone; few would directly relate to the experience of playing jazz drums. Yet you couldn’t have made a better movie with more well-rounded characters, more topics and ideas to broaden the audience. The focus kept us watching.
And so it goes for cars, for software, for drinks, for books and movies, for podcasts and lectures. There’s no one best product. There are, instead, infinite niches, and you’ll make something far more interesting by focusing on one specific thing.
Every brand’s worst danger is that people won’t notice, won’t care, won’t stop and pay attention. Any press is good press.
So you don’t build a vehicle for everyone. You build one for a specific type of customer, make something they’ll love. Something they’ll talk about. Something that builds a devoted fan base that will broaden over time.
“It’s not risky to sell a service that isn’t for everyone,” wrote Tom Hirst in a Twitter thread about freelancing. “It’s smart.”
TikTok used that to build a new social network where few thought they could. Every other video platform was built around long-form, landscape-oriented videos. TikTok limited you to 15 second-long, portrait videos, something that appealed almost entirely to people who weren’t already videographers. The constraints unlocked new creativity.
Toyota might find it risky to sell vehicles for extreme niches. Tesla in those early days would have found it far riskier to focus on anything other than the niches. They needed something that got people talking; even complaints were better than being ignored.
You too.
TED talks are so popular for two reasons: They’re short enough to watch on a coffee break, and focused on one thing so you know what you’ll learn. You might not take time to listen to any random person rambling for an hour; you’re far more likely to listen to someone tell something specific in 18 minutes. Perhaps they’ve got a lot of other interesting things to say. But you would have never started listening unless they took the time to edit their thoughts down to that one talk.
Cut all the things.
And that, perhaps, is what calls for the hardest work.
“If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; If I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now,” claimed US President Woodrow Wilson, echoing Blaise Pascal’s “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
You could say everything on your mind, talk for an hour, write a book out of one idea. Or, you could take Friedrich Nietzsche’s approach, who aspired to “say in ten sentences what others would say in a whole book.”
So you cut. You’ve got a single thing to say—and in the process of unpacking that idea, go ahead and let it all fall out. Fall down the rabbit hole. Then work it together into a cohesive narrative that tells one story, into a product that’s built for one specific thing. Your finished story might tell more than one thing, but each detail should serve the greater point, one idea building on another until your audience walks away with that core concept in mind.
That one single thing.
“Build a better mousetrap,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is often apocryphally quoted, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Clayton Christensen of Innovator’s Dilemma quipped the opposite: “Build a worse mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”—a nod to the prevalence of lower-cost, technically lower quality upstarts that often disrupt their pricier, “better” competition.
But perhaps the important thing is the mousetrap itself. Build a better widget that does a dozen things, talk all you want about a hundred ways to improve the world with your better mousetrap as point 87, and you’ll be lucky if crickets still hang around your door. It’s the focus on one thing—and making that one thing better in some way, finding something that catches people’s interest about that thing—that gets them to beat a path to your door.
You just have to say a single thing.
Originally published on the now-defunct Racket blog on June 30, 2021. Tree photo by Fabrice Villard via Unsplash.
The applause fades, the hush falls, and a moment later you’re engrossed in a topic you might only just be learning about. Iconic enough you could recognize them by sound alone, ubiquitous enough you’ve likely watched dozens already.
Yet it all started as “the dinner party I always wanted to have but couldn’t,” with the 300 or so folks Richard Saul Wurman gathered in Monterey, California for an inaugural conference around _T_ech, _E_ntertainment, and _D_esign.
Thus began TED.
“I'm bored out of my head at conferences,” said the founder behind perhaps the most famous conference. “I hate being spoken to. I hate education.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising his brainchild would become known for pithy speeches, that we’d learn how schools kill creativity and that we’re not ready for the next outbreak and more in 18-minute slots at this re-invented conference.
But it took time to get there.
For the next 90 minutes…
You know the feeling: The clock’s ticking, you’ve got to finish your project or submit your homework or file your taxes by midnight. And somehow, you pull it together in the nick of time and hit Submit without a minute to spare.
Now imagine being asked to speak at a conference, and the host is standing on stage hinting you should wrap things up.
That’s how TED talks and their famous 18-minute limit began.
“Presentations ran as long as 90 minutes,” reported Wired magazine about the first TED conference, scarcely different than the standard conference Wurman disliked.
“One path to true innovation is through subtraction,” Wurman would later remark when thinking back about TED. So, with the goal of wondering “What can I create that isn’t boring,” he shook up the presentations.
Wurman would sit on the platform during the talks. He’d stand up, perhaps when boredom kicked in, start walking toward the presenter, standing “closer and closer to them as their time runs out.” Before long, he’d have six people presenting within the 90 minutes an original speech took.
And so, a general 15 minute-limit on talks was standard by the time he sold the TED conference to Chris Anderson in 2001, prompted by little more than when Wurman felt the talks had covered enough and started to lose interest. But it wasn’t set in stone. “I kind of learned in my first year that 15 was often interpreted as 20 or 25,” remarked Anderson to Charlie Rose years later. “And so the 18 initially came in just as an attempt to be more precise.”
And that’s how TED talks managed to recreate what Anderson called “the ancient campfire experience” with information-dense, focused speeches.
There was no technical reason why 18 minutes was chosen, why 15 or 20-minute speeches couldn’t have been better. Perhaps some other time was optimal. But the original guideline stuck, and what started as Wurman crowding speakers off stage turned into today’s most popular talk limit.
That’s what they said.
And TED’s not alone. If anything, it brought conference speeches closer to the length of more public performances.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a mere 3 minutes long. Kennedy set a nation’s eye on the moon in 17 minutes. Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech was 3 minutes shorter than a TED talk.
Media found similar limits work well. The BBC thinks 3 minutes is enough to tell eight news stories; The News Manual says 15 minutes is enough time to tell 20 stories “and still treat each story properly.” Perhaps that’s too many stories, and you’d prefer more depth—Late-night comedy agrees while still sticking to 12-20 minute limits for its monologues.
18 minutes, as it turned out for TED talks, was “long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention,” remarked Chris Anderson after Wurman passed the TED torch. “One of the most common (presentation) killers is a lack of clarity,” a particular problem when you’re trying to build something not boring. The time limit saved the day. You can’t edit a live speech; the time limit forces you to self-edit as the next best thing.
“It has a clarifying effect,” said Anderson. “It brings discipline.”
And it turned into a set of guidelines the TED team would tell potential speakers, to keep talks focused on a single major idea—an idea that’s worth sharing.
The limit wasn’t merely helpful for speakers. It also kept listeners’ attention. For most topics, “People will begin to tune out after approximately 10 minutes," found biologist John Medina in research for his book Brain Rules. Even listeners who continue paying attention can only remember so much, anyhow: A 1995 study by the US Navy found “A 20-minute lecture was equal to the classic 50-minute lecture in terms of information retained.
There’s no perfect speech limit. TED’s 18-minute speech limit isn’t magical. But it does seem that it was a close approximation to the best time limit, that something between 10 and 20 minute-long speeches seems best.
Wurman’s original intuition was correct. The hour-long talks were indeed one of traditional conferences’ downfalls, and cutting it down to under 20 minutes did the trick. It kept speakers focused on one topic, kept listeners listening, and turned talks into something sharable, something you could watch on a break, something perfect to go viral.
And that’s how TED talks became 18 minutes long.
Originally published on the now-defunct Racket blog on June 15, 2021.
In early 2014, Danny Schreiber—then the sole person on Zapier's Editorial team—reached out and asked me to freelance for the Zapier blog. That was my luckiest career break—it started what turned into around five years helping the burgeoning automation platform grow and standardize its content marketing. It all started out with Zapier's app directory and software roundup articles, then branched out into tutorials, software reviews, eBooks, documentation, and more over a half-decade of writing.
And we did it all by being what I liked to call the "unmarketing marketing team." We weren't specifically trying to market Zapier, directly, shouting from the rooftops that you should automate this and that. Instead, we focused on our complements, the tools that people used alongside Zapier. We made our partners' software seem great, and that in turn led people to use their product and Zapier. So when people searched for those tools, odds are Zapier was the first thing that'd show up, and the first thing they'd think of when they wanted to take that product to the next level.
Here's the story of my editorial work at Zapier—how our team helped everyone find the business software they needed then taught them how to get the most out of it.
Did you know a spreadsheet was originally a sheet of raw rubber?
Or that the US government in World War II made the first documented use of the word spreadsheet to describe a table of numbers?
Spreadsheets, for decades after the PC revolution, were synonymous with Excel, and for good reason. It was the first spreadsheet on the original Macintosh, the first time spreadsheets left DOS and entered the world of windows. And feature by feature, integration by integration, they became an ingrained part of business life, enough that it was impossible to imagine a world without Excel.
That is, until a decade ago, when spreadsheet startups started popping up everywhere.
How do you lose a monopoly? It might start with your product becoming so popular people take it for granted—and then it becomes just another computing abstract, an interface people expect to work everywhere that they wouldn't be surprised to find showing up somewhere new. And then the competition can start showing up.
Here's my take on how Excel started getting competition.
DKIM is one of the easiest things to overlook when setting up your domain with Google Workspace already. It’s not required—you can add Gmail to your domain with a few a records and nothing else.
But you don’t want your emails to end up in spam folders. And a DKIM record won’t guarantee anything, but it will make it far more likely your emails will show up in your recipients’ inboxes. It’s worth the few extra minutes to set up.
And yet. Odds are, if you follow Google’s directions to add a DKIM record to your domain, you’ll get the “Email authentication was not verified” error that stumped me for so long.
If you double-click on Google’s TXT record value to copy it, your browser will show that only the DKIM record’s text is selected. If you look closely when you paste the text, though, you’ll notice that the copied text also includes the GENERATE NEW RECORD text from the button below your DKIM code.
So, before pasting your DKIM key into your domain DNS settings, it's worth pasting it into a text editor and making sure the end of the text string is your exact DKIM record, without any extraneous text tagging along at the end.
Then, open your domain registrar’s settings, add the DKIM record as a new TXT record, save your settings, and a day or so later you should be able to verify your domain.
If you still have trouble, check your DKIM Core Key Record on dkimcore, and if it doesn’t verify, try removing the last few characters from the end until you get exactly what Google’s settings page shows—and that should verify. That's how I figured out how to get my DKIM key to work in the first place.
Then, back to emailing, now with a bit more hope that your mail will land in the inbox instead of the spam folder.
I love testing software, trying new things, seeing what each new piece of software does better than the competition. But even with hundreds of accounts filling up my password manager, I still wasn’t quite prepared for the number of things I’d need to test to make a detailed Zapier software roundup.
By the time you’ve set up the same project in the 51st project management app, everything starts to blur together.
Yet if there’s anything I’ve written that’s had staying power, that’s gotten people to email and ask to include their app or how their team can pull off something similar, it’s the Zapier roundups.
So I finally pulled it all together, the tips and ideas I’d share with freelancers and new writers as we worked to make Zapier’s software roundups as detailed and useful as possible.
You need to gather data, then do something with it. Here’s how.
You may find yourself needing an easy way to gather data. A quick way to build a form, let people add their info and perhaps attach a picture or file, and then use that data somewhere productive.
You need a form app.
If you already have a go-to app to build forms—Wufoo or Typeform or JotForm or one of the dozens of other form builders—odds are it’ll be fine. Just open it, make a form, and go on with your day.
But perhaps you don’t need to make forms all the time and so don’t keep a form subscription active, now that most start at around $20/month thanks to software inflation. You just occasionally need to gather data, and need something quick and free—and the typical 5 forms and 10-100 submissions and 100MB of file uploads for free aren’t enough.
I needed something a bit more specific: A form builder that lets you upload files, POST entries from your website’s existing HTML forms, then view the form data together in a nice interface.
Turns out, the best options for that are a spreadsheet or a database app:
The best way to build a form for free and analyze data in a spreadsheet
It’s hard not to recommend Google Forms. It’s free, and saves your form entries to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. You could literally have a million people fill out a 4-question form, for free, in Google Forms. And that data’s in a spreadsheet, where you can sort and filter it however you want.
Odds are, you’ll export your form data as a .csv file, clean it up first, then import it into another app. With Google Sheets, the first two steps are included out-of-the-box.
Google Form supports file uploads now, too—and stores them in Google Drive, for 15GB of files, give or take depending on how much you’ve already stored in Drive.
Though that’s where Google Forms starts to fall apart a bit. Google Forms already look a bit stiff; they’re fine, but not going to win any design awards, and might not fit in if you embed them in your site. Embeds also only work if you don’t have a file upload field.
There is a Google Forms API, and you can even build Google Forms programmatically if you want—and Google Forms/Google Sheets integrations are so common, odds are there’s an easy way to connect your form results with other apps you use (at least using Zapier). There’s just no default way to POST new form results from your hand-coded form, without a workaround.
Google Forms is still what I reach for first when I need a quick form, especially if the end goal is to put the data in a spreadsheet.
The best way to to build a form, including file uploads, and turn the data into something usable
But what if you need a bit more? Airtable—a database app, essentially a modern take on Microsoft Access—might be your best option.
Airtable’s not promoted as a form app. Yet it includes a form tool as a way to get data into your database. And it supports file uploads, and has a robust API, and gives you more ways to visualize your data than you’ll likely need.
Basically, open Airtable, make a new database, then click the Create … Form option in the lower left corner. There, rename the existing fields to fit what your form needs, or tap Add a field to this table to add new form fields (remember, technically you’re building out a database, not just a form). There’s a bit of everything here: You can personalize the form, have fields validate data to make sure, say, the email field actually gets emails, and can even lookup data from other tables in your database (say, to build out an order form where people can pick products from a list, if you wanted).
You can then embed the form anywhere, or use Airtable’s API to create new records (you’ll need to store files people upload on your site first, and push the file’s URL to Airtable instead of directly uploading). Airtable even makes a customized API page specifically for your database, to make integrating even easier.
Once the data comes in, Airtable will show it in a spreadsheet-style table by default, but also includes kanban-style card and gallery views that will automatically show attached images as an easy way to preview your data, a calendar to visualize results by date, and timelines and more on pro plans.
Airtable’s free for 1.2k records per database (so folks can fill out your form 1,200 times for free, if you’re using it as a form app) with 2GB of file storage, then paid plans start at $12/mo. Odds are you end up using Airtable for far more than forms—but it’s a great form app, too.
Other great options:
It’s not like free options are everything, either—great software is always worth paying for, especially if it fits a need in your work. Here are a few other form apps I regularly recommend that are each great options if you need a bit more:
Typeform is beautiful, makes forms feel conversational inspired by the original WarGames film. It’s also pricy (from $29/mo. for 100 form entries to $99/mo. for 10k responses), so is a best fit if you’re building a lot of surveys. If so, it’s the prettiest way to do so and might make people more likely to keep filling out longer forms. It comes with a robust API, too: You can create forms programmatically, or build Typeforms into your app with its React library.
Paperform is another take at making forms prettier, this time with a more document editor-style form builder where you can make forms that look a bit more like a landing page. $24/mo. for 1k responses.
Wufoo’s a classic, one of the earlier form builder web apps, the friendly dino counterpart to MailChimp’s chimp. It’s been through a lot; Wufoo was acquired by SurveyMonkey which was then acquired by Zendesk. But it’s still a great way to make standard, straightforward forms—and with middle-of-the-road pricing at $19/mo. for 1k responses.
Formium is what got me digging into form apps again in the first place. It’s a developer-focused form app, from the team behind the Formik React form library. Call it a headless CMS for your developer-built forms—one that comes with a drag-and-drop form builder for everyone else. Only, it doesn’t support file uploads yet; that’s coming soon. $20/mo. for 1k responses. Also worth checking FormKeep, one of the few other developer-focused form apps.
Gravity Forms is another developer-focused option, this time as a WordPress plugin to build forms inside your blog. It’s a great way to build a low-code app out of WordPress, especially when paired with other WordPress add-ons (I once built a WordPress + Gravity Forms + Zapier site to gather data and showcase it on a map, among other things). $59/year per site.
PandaDoc is a unique form builder, one a bit closer to paper forms you’d typically associate with the IRS and the doctor’s office. Or, Formstack’s document tool (what was formerly WebMerge) can turn normal form entries into documents much the same.
Or: You might not need a form app.
The goal of a form isn’t just gather all the data, unless you’ve built a Pokémon form, in which case, carry on. Typically you need to gather data, and do something with it.
If you need to get people to sign up for your email newsletter, or send your team a support email, or buy your product, you likely don’t need a form builder.
Most email newsletter tools—including MailChimp, Substack, Campaign Monitor, Buttondown, and more—include a simple form builder to people signup to your email newsletter. A Webflow site or Ghost blog comes with built-in signup forms, too. Customer support tools like Help Scout, Front, Zendesk, and more similarly include contact form embeds, that turn form entries into new support tickets automatically. And if you want to sell stuff with a simple checkout form, your best bet is likely a Gumroad or Shopify embed for a checkout form and a way to manage orders together.
You could get similar results by exporting any form’s results as a .csv spreadsheet then importing them into your newsletter, help desk, or eCommerce software. Or you could automate it by linking any other form to your app via Zapier.
But using the built-in embed is your easiest option to gather data and put it to work. When that’s the goal, a form built into the tool where you’ll put the data to work is best.
Now, back to work.
In the end, it shouldn’t really matter which form app you use. What matters most is gathering the data you need, and getting what you need out of the data once it’s gathered. I've tested dozens of form builders at Zapier, and most get the job done. But when you need something specific, and especially when the budget matters, the options get a bit more scarce.
I'm struck by the parallels to Steve Jobs calling Dropbox a feature, not a product, now that the form builders I'd recommend most are essentially features in a larger product—and the best standalone form builders like Typeform or developer-focused tools like Formium went in entirely different directions to standard form apps to make a higher-end niche of their own. It's not enough to be just a plain form app anymore.
Google Forms + Sheets and Airtable are pretty great tools to do all that in one place. And don't forget to check the app where you'll be using the data—there's a chance it'll have a form builder, and if so that's almost always the best option since it saves you a step. Then, the other form builders are great if you need something more specific from your forms (which, if you can’t find one with exactly what you need, let me know on Twitter).
Happy data gathering!
one more thing.
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I joined Austin Petersmith and Mohammad Forouzani in mid-2019 to build Capiche, a software community where everyone could get their business software questions answered much like how developers get their code questions answered on StackOverflow. It grew, fast at times, slower at others, into a just-over-$1m acquisition by Vendr in early 2021.
Audio was the next thing. We'd considered building an online conference for Capiche in mid-2020, and those ideas morphed into launching Capiche FM as a pivot into live audio, first recorded over phone calls, later through a web app. It, too, had a core group of fans but hadn't quite caught fire, so over early 2021 we took some of the best ideas from Capiche FM and turned them into Racket. In its first version, Racket was aimed at shorter audio—9 minutes of audio recorded solo or with guests, then published as an almost audio take on Twitter or TikTok.
And it turned out shorter podcasts were what I'd wished podcasts had been all along. I've always struggled to find time to listen to hour+ long podcasts, but 9 minutes gave enough time for a meaningful conversation that anyone could find time to listen to. And it led to some great conversations I'll always be glad I had, from chats with authors including Elnathan John, Adam Davidson, Joshua Levy, Jason Crawford, and more, to talks with tech founders from Convertkit's Nathan Berry to Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia. I chatted with hundreds of creators in Racket DMs, and learned so much from community leaders including Rosie Sherry and others from the software testing community that embraced Racket early on. Perhaps the most fun was when Andrew Warner interviewed me on Racket about Racket.
After 3 apps in 3 years—a software community, then live audio shows, then short-form audio—it was finally time to give my own app idea, Reproof, a shot, something I'd wanted to do after gaining experience from being on the ground-zero of building Capiche. And today the rest of the Racket team is pushing ahead with an even shorter take on audio with Racket mobile and a 99 second time limit.
But some of those 9 minute chats were worth keeping around—and so, along with my Capiche FM recordings, here are some of my favorite Rackets from 2021:
I attacked Racket’s founding editor, where legendary podcaster Andrew Warner dug in with hard questions about the ideas behind Racket and short-form podcasts, in one of the conversations I enjoyed most on Racket.
The Windows 96 Story, another audio take on a Racket blog post, this time digging into a web app that nearly entirely recreates Windows of the '90's in your browser.
A series of Rackets with my friend Nathan Snelgrove after a 2021 Apple Event, where we talked about AirTags, Apple TV, software on the iPad, colorful iMacs, and in a shift away from Apple, the Canon R3. Couldn't fit all of that into 9 minutes.
(Coda: Racket shipped their mobile app, raised a pre-seed, and pivoted to being a podcast fund. In the end, though, it was shut down—it had its 9 minutes of fame, and taught us all something about short audio along the way. Here's to trying big, new things!)
The next big thing.
And then, there's the new startup I'm working on now—something that goes back to my roots in writing for the web. Sign up below to be among the first to know when the beta's live!
The day before that, even. Scratch that: If you’d started last week, a few months back, a year ago when the idea first hit your head, you’d already have some traction. You’d be on second base, at least.
But that was then, and this is now. You didn’t do it then—and that’s fine. Odds are you did some pretty great stuff instead.
And now it’s today, and it’s the best time to start.
There will never be a better time, in fact. You take a step today, and tomorrow you’ll be ready to take the next step. You write something today, it’ll be there for someone to read tomorrow, fall in love with, and follow you for the next great thing you’ll publish. Google will get a head-start indexing it today, so it’ll be ready when someone searches for it next month.
Your brain will say no, you should have done this before, and now it’s pointless, and look at everyone else who has already done the things and is so far ahead.
And, yeah, good point brain. But if you don’t do it now, you’ll just be stuck in the same old loop tomorrow, next week, next year. And your brain will still be saying too late, should have done it back then, but now...
Oceans rise, empires fall, and companies rarely last long enough to see even part of the cycle. Today’s most venerated brands were, not all that long ago, not even a thing.
Then someone said, you know what, I’m just going to start making watches or sewing handbags or mixing sparkling sugar water or writing code, and it was so. It wasn’t overnight, but with that slow compounding of time, one bit of great work on top of another, the dream became a thing.
That slow, steady process is perhaps most clear online, where Google search rankings are there for anyone who will put in the work to claim them. The questions people google every day aren’t going to answer themselves; if you’ll show up and write what people are looking for, publish it consistently, over time your stuff will do well, will get traffic, will get discovered by the folks who need it most. It’ll take time; it took well over a year to get Capiche ranking first for its name, for instance. But it also didn’t take any tricks, didn’t take hiding links and doing shady SEO tricks. It was just publishing, showing up every day and putting more stuff on Capiche that we bet could rank well. And eventually Google said, you know what, Capiche is a thing. A thousand little commits, cashed in at once.
That’s what you’re kickstarting when you start today. It’ll still take time. Nothing’s built overnight.
But at least you started. The first brick’s laid down. The foundation’s there.
Tomorrow you can tell your brain, no really I actually did the thing yesterday, and today I can do it again.
And then it’ll be the best time to take the next step.
writing about writing.
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