From Zero to Hero| CaptainForm

One year of form building

Aim high. It never killed nobody. That’s one of the most valuable things we learned after one year since launching CaptainForm.

And yes, we had all the reasons to aim high as the mother-company, 123ContactForm had 8 years of experience in the web form building field. It is said that “If you build a great product, they will come”. Dead simple, right? But not true, it doesn’t work like this in the overcrowded WordPress market, especially when your competitors are already known for years. However, it helped us a lot to have a great product. Thus, it was easier for us to market it and since launching it on 5th November 2015, CaptainForm has grown from an unknown product to a trustworthy plugin that can now compete with the already existing options.

This article sums up the initiatives of growing CaptainForm in a year since its launch from a marketing perspective. It’s not a panacea, just our own path, but I’m sure that some things can be useful for someone who plans to launch a plugin.

CaptainForm’s journey started in 2015 when we did a research on the WordPress market and analyzed our competitors. After noticing which were their limitations, we built our plugin in order to be the most convenient option. Soon, CaptainForm made its way into the world. We started promoting it through reviews and various articles.

Therefore, CaptainForm was featured in video reviews, but also in several famous publications such as Huffington Post, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Tech.co. And this was happening pretty soon after launching.

We also promoted the plugin in the Plugin Directory, with a  rating of 4.7 out of 5. During the year, we sent a couple of emails to our existing customer base to announce various discounts or news.

However, this wasn’t enough for us. We wanted honest feedback and opinions about CaptainForm in order to make all the right changes to improve it. Thus, we went to several WordCamps where we had the chance to meet many nice people, understand their needs and implement some of their requests. We listened to their feedback and made the required changes that improved our plugin. Of course, not every feedback was positive, but we learned from that. The next step was to create and publish the documentation and write several blog posts on those topics.

Additionally, we had to face those competitors already established for a long time on the market. Their plugins were already popular, so it was challenging for us to change users’ behavior and opinion. Nonetheless, we weren’t discouraged and we started to tell potential users about a new option and about the features that make us a very important player on the market in terms of price, functionality, customer support and user experience. And yes, one of the most frequent question at WordCamps was about what makes us different and better than our competitors, but we made it. The best proof is the positive feedback we received from many of them after they tested our product and told us that is extremely beneficial for them.

Launching new features was also part of CaptainForm’s one year journey such as centralized form management and WordPress users registration. Gamification and referral program were also some of our initiatives. After a year since launching, the average conversion rate from free to paid users is 7.11%.

We’re proud to say that a total number of 20,856 forms have been created with CaptainForm so far and out of all of the forms created, 62.5% have received submissions. Moreover, our average response time to support tickets is 1.55h by email (weekends included) and 40s by live chat.

Probably the most important feature that we have implemented up to now is allowing users to save submissions on their own server or on our servers, which are highly secured and backed up daily. Looking back, all these wouldn’t have been possible without our marketing team, which always aimed high and believed in the product.

Thanks for making it so far, it was a long blog post. If it was helpful for you or if you need similar articles in the future, feel free to tell us in the comments section below. We would happily provide more details.

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