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aytekin

1,638 karma · joined November 18, 2008

Founder of JotForm

aytekintank@jotform.com

https://aytekintank.com/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aytekintank/

https://medium.com/@aytekintank

https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/aytekin-tank

https://twitter.com/aytekintank

submissionscomments
aytekin··on Build, edit, and analyze forms directly inside ChatGPT
Hi HN,

We built a ChatGPT app that lets you create and manage Jotform forms through conversation. You can generate forms, refine them, and analyze submissions without leaving ChatGPT.

Here’s the link: https://www.jotform.com/chatgpt/

Happy to hear feedback or questions.

@aytekin

aytekin··on Cross-Database Queries in SQLite
That might be the goal. If you are storing private data for your users which should not be queried. You can have separate encryption keys for each user and keep their data on separate databases.
aytekin··on Ask HN: How to effectively get feedback from users?
Offering to give users a $50 Amazon gift certificate in exchange for a 45 minute call works pretty well for us.

Since we know that 3 out of 10 users who receive this offer will accept it we segment users by industry / feature usage etc. and send offers to talk to them to listen their stories and feedback.

aytekin··on A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
This is why when investors replace founders the companies stop innovating. Obvious ideas don’t have any value. You need deep domain knowledge to see how things really are, and not how things seem to be.
aytekin··on If your product is great, it doesn't need to be good (2010)
What he means: If your product (first version) is Great (at a few important things), it doesn't need to be Good (at everything)

I think the unstated “first version” part is important. You should be gradually adding the missing parts. And not just leave it at the great, simple but missing too many things state forever.

aytekin··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
Facebook/Twitter is terrible for putting down ideas. You don’t control what happens to your content. Posts get lost in the sea of millions of other posts. These companies constantly change policies.

Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.

What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.

aytekin··on How Payments Providers Screw You (2015)
https://gocardless.com/en-us/faq/merchants/

“Do you take credit or debit cards?

No, GoCardless is an ACH debit company.”

Most people prefer credit cards. How does it work? Do you ask people if they want to pay by ACH?

Or do you detect debit cards on your credit card form and use this instead of the credit card processor?

aytekin··on Pioneers vs. Process People
Pioneers are supposed to be working behind the scenes on the next version, not quitting the company.
aytekin··on State of SaaS Product Onboarding
Make your product so good that it doesn’t need any annoying walkthroughs, tips or checklists.

How? User testing, full story, user interviews, detailed product metrics, continuous improvements and giving your designers a lot of power.

aytekin··on State of SaaS Product Onboarding
It was beautiful on iPad. Maybe it is designed for mobile.
aytekin··on Outcome Over Output: Also Impact and Effort
A good way to measure outcome is to watch how many people are using a new feature (or a new version of an existing feature) successfully and how often they use it. The key word here is “successfully”. Don’t just measure how many people tried to use a feature. Define and measure success with a feature.
aytekin··on People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study
More likely: "People who live 85 or more have more of the good things like health and safe environment which also makes them optimistic."
aytekin··on Founder came back after 8 years to rewrite Flash photo editor in Canvas/WebGL
Do you regret selling it in the first place?
aytekin··on Takeaways from the $566M BriansClub Breach
Can they handle monthly subscriptions?
aytekin··on Strategies for Long Projects
I love doing something similar with my small kids (4 and 2). I start laughing for no reason and when they see me laughing they start laughing. We laugh and have good time without any reason until we get tired. I also remember seeing some festival in India on TV. Everyone is laughing and having good time, for no reason.
aytekin··on Self-serve first: an overlooked paradigm underlying great software companies
We have been self-serve product for the first 12 years and a year ago we launched our Enterprise version. As the article mentions because of the existing high traffic it has been pretty easy to find leads. We have already signed 100 Enterprise customers. Our main challenge was not to find customers, in fact we struggled to catch up with leads. The main challenges were making the product Enterprise ready with necessary features such as covering most popular SSOs and building admin privileges on the Enterprise product, and trying to build a sales team from scratch.

We had to hire 3 sales people before we found someone right. It is like someone hiring developers without any development experience. You get it wrong because you don't know what makes someone good. Get help from someone who has experience. We finally found the right person from our network and suddenly sales started flying.

aytekin··on A History of Börek
I was at a luxury Turkish resort in the Mediterranean this summer. It had an amazing open buffet. You could find anything you want. I'd just fill two plates with different boreks and nothing else. Hot, right out of the oven, they were amazing.
aytekin··on Troubles with the AWS web console
Here is a startup idea for grabbing: Make a better interface for AWS/Google Cloud.

Since their APIs covers everything this should be possible. Be the first UXaaS.

A killer feature: a server by server breakdown of Google Cloud expenses. It is impossible to understand what you are paying for on Google Cloud. They lump everything together in an incredibly confusing bill.

aytekin··on Ask HN: How Do You Read?
I second the slow reading. Reading is thinking. Let your mind wander.
aytekin··on The Most Dangerous Writing App
Looks like an amazing solution for doing Morning Pages. Here is how I do it currently: https://medium.com/swlh/how-ive-used-morning-pages-to-grow-a...
aytekin··on How we send 22k emails every hour
"tiny AWS instance running Postfix under Ubuntu. It has 2 Gigs of memory, priced around $9/month and the CPU load rarely goes beyond 15%"

The title should have been "How we send 22000 emails every hour for $9/month"

16 million emails for $9 is actually pretty good.

aytekin··on Why aren’t more companies remote-first?
In most development work team productivity is more important than individual productivity. I have found that the best approach is to have co-located team rooms. (And the team members should be working on the same project. Putting people together does not make it a team. If everyone has a different project, that’s not a team)

If the work has to be done individually, then there is no point in being co-located. Remote works well.

Co-located teams communicate well, decide and move quickly, and has much higher trust between team members.

Work that does not require too much communication, speed and collaboration is more suitable to remote.

This hybrid approach worked well for us.

aytekin··on Tanker: End-to-End Encryption SDK for JavaScript
We have been supporting this feature on our web app for many years: https://www.jotform.com/encrypted-forms/

Knowing only you have access to tha data is a good thing. For example, we are able to host our internal employee feedbacks and reviews on our own forms without worrying about a sysadmin or database admin having access to it.

I understand the concerns about client side manipulation but that is hard to do without leaving a trail on our code commit history. Both system and product changes can only be done by code commits.

You cannot protect systems with a single perfect security solution. You have to be paranoid and have many layers in your security model. This may not be the silver bullet, but this greatly enhances the security.

aytekin··on A former lead designer of Gmail fixes Gmail with a Chrome extension
I do inbox zero so I am not usually looking at the email list, but to the actual emails. I also started using larger fonts as I am now 40. So, the amount of space the left and the top frames take up is quite a lot. I haven’t tried this but hopefully this can fix that.

By the way, here are the tricks I do to do inbox zero on gmail: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290175

aytekin··on The Web is missing an essential part of infrastructure: an open web index
4% of the Google index hit by de-indexing

https://searchengineland.com/4-of-the-google-index-hit-by-de...

aytekin··on Jerks on the Internet: what my first DDoS taught me
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
aytekin··on How we manage plans and features in our SaaS app
5% + 50c!

They only make sense if you are small in scale. Use them when you are starting out and then build your own after you have a good number of paid users.

aytekin··on Intrinsic Value of a SaaS Business: A 20 Year DCF
Yes, once you scale really big it is hard to keep a high growth rate. But if you have been always growing at 50% YoY, it is possible to keep that rate even at year 12. This is pretty common amount bootstrappers. I am speaking from my own experience at the company I founded: JotForm’s last 7 years were at 50%.

Ahrefs recently announced a similar growth rate: https://medium.com/swlh/how-we-achieve-65-yoy-growth-by-igno...

aytekin··on How to make yourself work when you don’t have any motivation
Money as a motivator sucks. It is much more easier to earn money as a side effect of being really good at what you do.
aytekin··on Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?
Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

An amazing book full of great stories and lessons to learn from people who made incredible innovations like the first iPhone. My favorite parts are the story of the iPhone keyboard and detailed encounters of Steve Jobs demos he has given.

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