12 Highlights from Our First 12 Months

This November marks CaptainForm’s one-year anniversary. It’s been quite a ride so far! We have learned just how awesome the WordPress community is and we are very proud to be a part of it. While we are getting ready for all of the wonderful years to come, we’d like to take a moment to share 12 highlights from our first 12 months with you.

1. A total number of 20,856 forms have been created with CaptainForm so far. The most popular form types are registration forms, order forms, surveys and, of course, simple contact forms used to generate leads. Some user scenarios are very complex, yet beautifully laid out, which gives us confidence in what the flexibility of our product and the bold ideas of our users are concerned.

2. Out of all of the forms created, 62.5% have received submissions. There are many things that need to happen between the moment a new form is created and the moment it actually receives a submission. So this percentage is really encouraging to us, as it means that our forms perform well and look inviting to the people who submit them.

3. Our average conversion rate from free to paid users is 7.11%. The average in our industry and for our business model is between 2% and 4%. A reason for our high conversion rate is the fact that our free forms are fully functional and we try to restrict usage as little as possible, in order to build trust in the reliability of our product. Upgrades are made only for advanced functionality, like PDF submissions or payment integration.

4. About 70% of our users come from the Plugin Directory. Since success in the Plugin Directory is defined by the vocal and transparent community, it is an honor for us to see that users believe in CaptainForm and recommend it to others. At the moment, we enjoy a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.

5. 51.3% of our users are small business owners, whereas 37.6% are digital agencies. It is a pleasure to work both with business owners who are setting up or revamping their websites and with agencies who need to attend to their clients’ needs. Both verticals bring us precious insight into what people really need from CaptainForm and into how we should develop it further.

6. We allow agencies to manage their clients’ forms in a centralized way. We launched this feature in June 2016. Basically, agencies can have all of their clients’ forms in the same WordPress installation and share each form group with the client it belongs to. This saves a lot of time, as the agency doesn’t need to log in to their clients’ websites anymore and can also duplicate complex forms from one client to another.

7. We are very responsive to user requests. Many of the new features that we develop are based on the feedback received from our users. Probably the most important such feature that we have implemented up to now is allowing users to save submissions on their own server or on our servers, where they are highly secured and backed up daily.

8. Our average response time to support tickets is 1.55h by email (weekends included) and 40s by live chat. We believe that providing good technical support is mandatory for a good product. Besides helping users achieve their goals faster, this allows us to stay connected to how our product works in real life and to how it can be optimized in terms of usability.

9. CaptainForm was featured in tens of publications, like Forbes, Entrepreneur or Tech.co. Apart from this, many WordPress-focused websites have published honest CaptainForm reviews that helped us see what we are doing particularly well and what can be improved. We have been reviewed by 68 publications so far.

10. We attended 6 WordCamps where we met some great people. We gathered more feedback, established partnerships and got to really understand how the WordPress community works. It would have probably taken us years to learn by ourselves what we have learned by attending these events.

11. Now for some entertainment, we launched the CouponCatcher. It is a simple game that invites users to relax a bit and to win discount coupons in the process. You can play it here.

12. Last but not least, the people behind and around CaptainForm – both developers and users – are one of the most important highlights for this year. To everybody who has been involved in any way in this project, thank you for being a part of the story!