Kevin, who was involved in the original idea for Wufoo and how did it come about?

The company was founded by Chris and Ryan Campbell and myself. In 2003, I was doing some writing and design for a small division at a research university when I met Chris, who was doing some web application development there. Chris introduced me to his brother, Ryan, who at the time was still a student and writing all the database programming examples for his professor’s computer science textbook. For about a year, we talked constantly about how frustrating it was to build these really boring forms and databases for our employers, who failed to appreciate how much tedious work was involved just to create something simple as a contact form or an online survey.

While we thought about the idea around 2005, we didn’t start writing the first lines of code until after we got accepted into Y Combinator in January 2006. We knew right away that it was a good idea, the trick was figuring out how to architect our time to give us the opportunity to just sit down, focus and build a prototype. While we started off on the bootstrapping route, it wasn’t until we got funding that we were able to work on it full time.

Successful bootstrapping is all about discipline and stamina. Every scenario I’ve ever heard is some variation of coming home exhausted from regular work and figuring out how to muster additional energy to do more work. There’s no secrets from what I can remember from our own experience and from what I’ve seen others try. It pretty much sucks. Especially if you like anything else interesting in your life…like family, friends, hobbies, relationships, etc. My advice is that you remember your motivations and do what you can to stay positive. I honestly believe that if you figure out how to dedicate a solid few hours of work every single night to your side project, there’s no way it doesn’t manifest into something. It might not go exactly as planned, but something always happens. Oh, and document everything. People are voracious for the products of productive people. There is some wild fascination by all of humanity about those moments that show how things happen behind the scenes. That knowledge and more specifically that kind of sharing attracts not just an audience but potential fans—people with an intimate understanding of your process, justifications and roots. That’s invaluable.

On the steps of the Austin Convention Center at SXSW Interactive 2005, all three of us were talking after a day of panels and we decided that there was absolutely nothing separating us from any other successful person at the conference. That’s when we decided to start a blog and that lead to a magazine that we charged for, to help us moonlight program at nights. Eventually, we got inspired, scored some seed funding through Y Combinator and built something that liberated us from the land of the cubicles.

All of the above. It’s not even our formula. We heard this strategy for the first time from Jason Fried of 37signals fame at a session at SXSW many years ago on doing big things with small teams. They started their relationships with their users with their blog Signal vs Noise long before they built Basecamp and we all know how that story is going (hint: well!). Anyway, we ran Particletree for about a year before we got into Y Combinator.

The name came up some time after a few weeks of coding. One of the people accepted into Y Combinator at the time was Beau Hartshorne, the creator of instantdomainsearch.com. He did all this crazy algorithmic domain name availability matching system and was able to give us a list of 5 letter domain names that were still available. We all went through the list and Wufoo just jumped out at me. I really liked it because it was a combo of two bands I really liked : Wu-Tang Clan and Foo Fighters. I kept saying over and over and eventually it stuck. The platform was based on what we knew well at the time from working on Particletree, our web development experiments blog at the time.

When during the process did you bring on other members to the team or involve other people to help you build a product ready for launch?

So we started writing the first lines of code in January 2006 and we launched later that summer in July of 2006. It was still just the founders then doing all the development. We did, at the time, outsource our server management to a boutique company based in San Francisco at the time called Bitpusher. They handled all of our infrastructure, hardware and networking needs since that wasn’t our strong suit. Because we were (and still are) a small team that desired to stay a small team, we didn’t hire for almost two years.

Honestly, best of luck to you. And I mean it. I don’t believe in the idea that there’s only one correct way to build a company. Companies that make a lot of revenue tend to be big companies. So if you want to make gobs of money, there’s a pretty strong correlation there. A few things that we like about staying small is the discipline it places on everyone to make the most of our resources to serve a large and growing audience of users, the very intimate and positive culture we’ve been able to develop that we’re very proud of, and because we are a company that offers a profit sharing plan with employees, the math works out in our favor if we keep it small.

The initial vision of Wufoo was actually as an ASP content manager with the ability to allow for unlimited inputs and reversible forms, which means they could be used for both backend management and public submission. Basically, the worst elevator pitch ever described. As we wised up, ASP turned into PHP and we tried to narrow our focus to form building.

Well, PHP was open source and therefore free and for a startup that’s a big thing. Plus, they have a great community that’s easily accessible and so that was also part of the calculations over a language like .NET.

The form building angle actually came from Paul Graham, one of our investors who serves as one of the partners over at Y Combinator. What we kept describing required a lot of words and that’s terrible in a pitch situation. Since our focus was creating a UI to design the front end easier while we magically take care of the backend, it just made sense to distill it down to what makes sense from the user perspective. Content Managers, Database Application Creators, Spreadsheets and Form Builders are really all variations of the exact same concept and principles. How you choose to describe yourself is really a marketing angle and at that time, the space was ripe for something new in that category.

In the beginning we started off with this giant grocery list of all the features we could ever think could go into Wufoo. Fortunately, we had a very real deadline created by Y Combinator that required us to have some sort of working prototype to show off to a room full of investors in three months and so that kind of constraint resulted in us removing almost 50% of the features on that initial list right away. The next deadline we made for ourselves came out of wanting to give an exclusive to TechCrunch on launch on July 5, 2006. To reach that date, we paired down our ideas to the most basic things we could think of to get a user going from build form, view entries, edit entries, design styles and create reports. That came out to something like 30 features I think. That said, we weren’t super specific and were still over zealous about our ambitions and skills and so we actually had features on that initial 30 that we didn’t finish until just this year (4 years later!).

You’re right, constraints in the form of deadlines really help people focus their energies down to the essentials. Not much advice to give if you’re having trouble with feature creep. Most people have some sort of ticking clock in place that’s usually tied to funds if not an event in time like meeting with a room full of investors. For people worried about cutting out too many features, I feel like you can always cut something down to one really well-executed feature. Many software ideas starts as such an embryo. I also don’t believe that software is ever truly “done” and so you can always take solace in the fact that users will always ask for more features and give you opportunities to expand upon your creation. I honestly believe waiting for the big launch is a silly idea especially in this age on the web. The life of your app only just begins when your users can have at it. To me, everything before that is just posturing and guesses.

Get it out there to real users. Critiques from other designers and developers are rarely accurate or helpful and so I think that desire to refine before launch is over expressed in most founders. If you’re planning to make money off the app directly (like with a freemium model) I highly recommend having that ready to go and out there with prices right at launch. There’s this great advice from Joe Kraus, the guy behind Excite and JotSpot, who emphasizes that you have to beta test your business model along with your software.

What I don’t think people need to worry about a lot in the beginning is speculation. Lots of arguments happen in the beginning of most startups based on postulations, hypotheses and predictions. I find those discussions usually lead to wasted energy arguing about possibilities that can’t be proven at the time. I definitely prefer to worry about decisions based on realities and can end with some kind of action item that will lead to an answer. I think what you have to realize is that arguments like those arise out of a lack of information and when you can get to the point where you can use data and revenue to make decisions about direction and focus, those discussions are so much less stressful. I’m always recommending people staying away from the future and keeping themselves in the present by making sure that what they work on is accompanied with measurement and observation. This way, when questions about the future come up, they can extrapolate instead of postulate.