Show HN: Create and collect forms directly from email

by wim • 14 years ago

38 27 14 years ago

wim8• 14 years ago

We were looking for some kind of "posterous for forms", but couldn't really find anything, so we created this side project. You can create (web)forms with email, and collect data directly from replies to the form email you send out (so people don't have to click on a link to an external form).

Any feedback is welcome, especially on whether this is something others might find useful as well?

muzrix• 14 years ago

i used Google Sites and Google Forms mainly to collect the data of my customer. If this form can be integrated to both would be nice

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks, the results and the webform pages should be pretty easy to embed, we'll have a look at some more integration.

mostlystatic• 14 years ago

Looks really good and I like that you don't have to create an account. I didn't run into any major issues. Just a few thoughts:

- I found the copy after "Try a demo" a bit confusing. I wasn't aware of the concept of creating the form by sending an email, so the first sentence didn't make much sense initially. Maybe make the "To get started, copy the example text below. " more prominent and break up the "We'll reply..." sentence into something shorter.

- Once I've created a form and go to the homepage, could you show a link to it on the homepage?

- When I got the email to fill out the form I wasn't sure if I was supposed to edit the quoted text (even though that's exactly what you were telling me to do). Maybe add a link to the web form just in case.

Keep up the good work!

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Good points, we'll also try to change the text a bit. It's funny that we had some more people say they were really surprised that it "just worked" to reply inline, but we'll probably add an option to include a link to the webform in the email header or footer as well.

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

Nice idea and congrats on shipping!

Just so you know, small typo on the "Collect data from replies" column: "That's availabe too!"

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks, fixed!

Fletch137• 14 years ago

On the try a demo, it'd be nice if you could have an example email sent to your email address (maybe the form that appears when you click the button now, so that you can do a side-by-side comparison).

garagemc2• 14 years ago

Looks good, just try to think about how to use this for lead generation purposes.

jwdunne• 14 years ago

It would be cool if I could import an email list from a CSV, similar to how MailChimp does it. Including support to reference other things, such as name, would also be useful but CSV is a big one. I say this because I am almost always handed a CSV from the client when sending out a newsletter.

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks, good to know. It's possible to paste in a list of comma separated addresses in email format, but I suppose the CSV files usually have separate columns for email/firstname/lastname/etc. We'll look into that! Of course you can also use EmailForm in combination with e.g. MailChimp, just set the Reply-to address to form+FORM_ID@emailform.io for the mails you send out.

danvoell2• 14 years ago

Feedback: I was confused by the demo. Just trying to help.

- Cool! Just send us an email to new@emailform.io with your form.

Is the form the text below?

- To get started with an example, copy the text below.

Once I copy it, is this what i send to you?

- We'll reply you with a private link to access your online form & database, so you can start sending out forms and collecting data.

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback Dan! You got it, the "text below" is what you can send to us and which we'll then turn into a form/database. We'll try and change the wording to make it more clear!

danvoell2• 14 years ago

OK got it working. There might be a slightly simpler way to do this tutorial. Step 1: Copy the text "form" below into your email. Step 2: Send the email to new@emailform.io You're done! We'll reply... Great concept, best of luck!

artursapek• 14 years ago

I am very impressed with how rapidly .io is becoming the cool new domain.

RaSoJo• 14 years ago

True...but i do wonder why it is so popular...

highace• 14 years ago

Because it hasn't been dominated by domain squatters and it has a techie association (input-output).

But I still wouldn't use it for a serious business venture. Look at how a lot of previous x.io companies have now switched to xio.com.

Irregardless• 14 years ago

How do I check the formatting before it's sent? How do I add a company logo or change the styling (colors, fonts, etc.)? Do I have to go back and forth through email if corrections are necessary? How do I send out a test survey then delete the results from my data set so they aren't included with the real one? Can I track who failed to respond and needs a follow-up email?

I'm (unfortunately) the one who gets stuck creating and sending out surveys for my company whenever it's necessary, and those are just a few questions I have after glancing at your demo. Right now, I can't see any situation where this would be preferable to SurveyMonkey. It might be acceptable for a quick and dirty internal survey, but I couldn't consider sending a questionnaire to our vendors or clients without having full control over the format and styling. Either that or I'd need to see evidence that your final product will be professional looking -- including some screenshots of a finished survey would help with that.

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, those are all very good points.

Because we were looking for something to create forms fast and collect data inline from emails, we created this initial version and decided to share it already. So although it's currently still lacking features like rich formatting and email list management, we're curious to see if people like the concept, and if there's enough uses already for this first version. It's all still pretty basic, so currently to make changes or start a new survey after a "test" run, you'll need to send a new email to new@emailform.io. It can be used already in combination with services like MailChimp though, e.g. for more email list management.

Anyway, thanks for checking out the demo, and we hope to add more functionality soon.

jbarciauskas• 14 years ago

So, the purported benefits are that a) it's easier to create the form than other form creators and b) you'll get improved response rates because people fill out the form in-line and reply rather than clicking a link?

Marketing managers don't want to learn some type of special markdown, and I can't imagine they would ever prefer it to a nice WYSIWYG form creator like Wufoo or SurveyMonkey.

No one wants to try and figure out exactly where to click and put their "X" for each choice - that's a much more frustrating user experience than native form controls, even in a desktop browser. On a mobile device? Forget it, and don't forget that something like 30% of emails are opened and clicked on mobile devices.

Apparently Google Forms has a way of embedding native forms in emails, although I'm not sure how they do it:

http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2011/05/24/increase-survey...

Now that would actually improve response rates, and was what I was hoping to see here.

eli• 14 years ago

Google just straight up embeds a <form> tag for those messages. Works if your recipient uses gmail (usually), but not such a great idea in general.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/

wim8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment!

HTML emails would be a next step to look at, and it would be great to be able to combine the advantage of fast/easy form creation without the need for any 'markdown' (just like most marketing managers probably also wouldn't type their blog posts in markdown, even though that might be more popular here). As we also have a different product which actually has a WYSIWYG form creator, this is just a nice way for us to experiment with different ways of creating forms, and see if there's ways to improve the workflow.

Inline html forms are another way of collecting the inline replies, but not every email client supports them (although gmail does), which means some people still have to click a link. It's definitely something worth exploring more though.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

i just tried this. it worked very nicely.

but i'm someone who still reads email via a terminal program and composes the message in emacs.

so for someone like me, this works great (and i was impressed by the parsing - i didn't try to make your life easy, but you extracted exactly the right data).

but i am not sure i have many uses for it. i suspect people that do have uses also care about branding crap, html mess and the like... but, again, for me, it rocks.

woah• 14 years ago

Hey guys, looks cool. I want to build an automated response email system for an entirely different purpose, and I'm wondering what technologies you're using. I've looked at Lamson a bit.

coreymaass• 14 years ago

Mailgun and sendgrid both have email parsing. I've used them in a couple projects and work quite well.

e1ven• 14 years ago

Looks really interesting, but I don't want to send all my emails through you.

I'd love to see something similar as a Python Library, though- It is unlikely to be competitive to your business, since the overlap between marketing guys who are going to pay you, and IT guys who would do it in Python are small ;)

I'd be happy to pay for a solution if you had one.

Show HN: Create and collect forms directly from email

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