Unlocking business insights with Farokh – The man behind Formaloo!

Pratik

Welcome to SaaS unlocked. We bring you experts, entrepreneurs and founders around the globe to share their product and ideas with the world. Today on the show I have very special guest. He is cofounder and CEO at Formaloo. His name is Farokh Shahabi . Farokh, very, very warm welcome to the show and we have met before but really inspired by your entrepreneur journey. You’re also a TEDx speaker. So,I would love to know a bit more about your personal side which world doesn’t know so would like to share with us.

Farokh

Thank you. Thank you very much and glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Pratik

Exciting journey you had so far Farokh, when I look at your journey you, you’re kind of a serial entrepreneur and I would say. What inspired you to create your product like Formaloo for example and how did you come up with this idea?

Farokh

So if I want to talk about it, basically it’s a long, long term of a previous ventures and everything. But the if I want to summarize that, it would be that I’m somehow a lazy person you would say. And I want to do things very very fast and with not so much hooplas or learning a lot of things and learning to different tools or different coding. I was a developer myself and when I was a developer I I was always looking for shortcuts. So if I can find a shortcut I would definitely use that. So back then I was first really.

Farokh

Excited about framing framework and instead of putting in vanilla and everything. And when I later on we saw the rise of CMS systems like WordPress and different systems I was I was in love with them because they would have done what it would have taken me days in matter of like minutes. So I can basically automise a large portion of my work just by using them. So the idea of. Was by me that if I can do something faster and easier, why shouldn’t I?

Pratik

Define to us like you know what Formaloo does in like 1 short description.

Farokh

So Formaloo  basically is a platform so you can create any applications that you want, especially business applications without anybody. So you can create your own custom CRMS, your own HR portals, your forms, dynamic dashboards, anything that you can. Imagine membership websites, even mobile applications without any coding.

Pratik

So it’s like an it’s a gold mine for entrepreneurs because at the end of the day, when you are building a product, you need to like, you know, have a CTO, co-founder, you need to have development knowledge, you have product ideas, but you need a lot of money and resources to build that product. And Formaloo, with no code collaboration platform makes it so much easier.

Farokh

The idea started that way. So we had a team of developers. And we always had more projects that we had manpower and we wanted to do more in less time basically. So when we started from allow it was based on as a an answer to that idea. So we wanted to create past and deliver our projects fast and with less amount of the developer time so we can turn more revenue. So we started formally on that promise.

Pratik

So when did you start this company?

Farokh

So we are started. They have the full version on 2020.

Pratik

2020, it’s been almost two or three years actually. Yeah. So how did you see this product evolve since it’s launched?

Farokh

So when we started that, we started with the handful of enterprises that were using our platform from my previous ventures. As I said, we developed these for them so they can and we can basically deliver their products faster and faster and customize their solution and they step it formal and liked it and. used it, but in a Fast forward two years, now more than 25,000 businesses using us all over the world and the.

Pratik

Next time I’m hearing it right, 25,000 in three years.

Farokh

Yes, 25,000.

Pratik

Yeah, Farokh, this is incredible success, I would say. What do you think? Like, you know, what are the key factors that were included in your success journey last three years? We would love to hear the success story.

Farokh

So one of the things that our coming to you there really. Responded to and really liked the speed of the development of Formaloo. So Formaloo, can do a lot of things but people want more customizations, and more features that then so they can create more powerful applications and added those customizations. For example in many fields Formaloo is the most customizable solution writer in the world for for example a customizing your applications for the clients for agencies. These are very big with us and that was a very responsive with our users. Another thing was that formally was equilibration platform, not just another builder. So most no code tools out there are just a builder. You create something and that’s it. But with Formaloo, you have a collaborative platform. You can add your team members, collaborate on real time, work with each other’s data and create more powerful things faster.

Pratik

So can I ask you a simple and silly question maybe? Here do you need to be a developer in order to develop a product on Formaloo?

Farokh

Not at all. So our biggest actually customers are the business users, what we call them, the ones that never coded one day in their lives. Marketing agencies, HR teams, product teams, operation teams, these are our biggest customers.

Pratik

So you you found me as a new customer, man.

Farokh

Of Course!

Pratik

You know, when I was growing up I was always inspired by like Bill Gates because he was creating like great products and back then and I wanted to become like him. So I chose computer science as my major. But eventually after studying 14 hours a day I failed and I switched to business side of things. So me like internally from Soul. I wanted to become a developer but I could not develop. I have ideas to bring the products to live but I need help from external sources. Right. That’s how I build my companies. Now the product like yours solve such a big problem out there for entrepreneurs, at least in my opinion, and I am the first one that, I think will definitely use it. By the end of this show, we are gonna share some of the special discount code that Farooq has for us so that fellow entrepreneurs like myself can go and use Formaloo who haven’t used it yet and be part of like you know, 100,000 journey that you will have in next one year. So how, how was, how has your product help businesses grow their business? If you can share some light on case studies that you might have or entrepreneurs who are in starting their journey, how this has helped them scale. Do you have anything success journey of an entrepreneur that you want to share with us?

Farokh

Of course, of course. So then we have a 2 main segments of customers. The first one are teams inside the SMEs, for example, HR team, product team, operation teams, the marketing teams. Those are our big segment. And the second one, our marketing and development agents and which is a very interesting and very highly growing market for us. So basically agencies with us, they are creating their online agency inside Formaloo. So they create all the things that they need to run their business inside one platform and they can manage all of their clients in that platform as well. We have right now around 7000 agencies using Formaloo all over the world. Especially in the US and after that UK and India that the majority of our agencies are there and they are developing creative tools and applications for their clients and managing them at the same time. So because I think you know that the the most important part of an agency is managing their customers. So every day they ask them to do a lot of things to maintain something customized.

Farokh

Something and all agencies love a tool that they can maintain their customers easily and create something, for example, a customer portal for themselves so they can manage their deal flow, manage their status of their customers and basically deliver the best results to their client.

Pratik

Wow. So what do you think? Like the future holds for like no code platform or this industry that you’re serving?

Farokh

No code industry is a one of the greatest things that happened in the past few years and. And it’s growing really, really fast. For example, in the past five years, no code industry grew 10 times. So it’s one of the fastest and highest growing industries that we have. And there there is only one reason for that because we already need more software in the world that we have developers. So we don’t have enough developers. That’s the that’s the fact. So there’s no code tools will grow much, much, much faster in the upcoming years because.

Farokh

Me as a developer or anyone else, if I can reduce my time and automize everything by like 70 percent 80%, why shouldn’t I do it? If I can create something without hiring an outsourcing someone else, why shouldn’t I do that?

Pratik

So maybe I wanna ask bit more technical question for people who are developers who’s listening to us. So what kind of technology this product is built on? So when there is a product built on Formaloo,

Who, you who? Owns the source code.And whether they can export the code. How does that work? Maybe you want to shed some light here.

Farokh

Of course! so we have a great tool for developers as well, because again we used it ourselves and we needed a lot of tools to customize our own development and so the developers can use formal to create things and they can export it even natively. For example we have SDK for different platforms especially in Python or in a Android development. For iOS development event so they can export your code and own your code and use formalizing infrastructure and not a coding system. So you can add your own code as well, add your custom modules or use our APIs, web hooks or automations anywhere they want.

Pratik

Really amazing. Now maybe I’m switching bit of switching the gears towards more on the personal side of your entrepreneurship journey. What tips do you have for other entrepreneurs looking to launch a successful Product ?

Farokh

So,I say this a lot about the I would say it again as smart as small as possible. When we started from a loop, it was very very very small and just did couple of things good. That was it. So it that it didn’t have a lot of modules, it wasn’t a made for a scaling or anything at all. Actually the first version that we created would have been broke. It had more than 1000 users at the same time so it wouldn’t work. And when we saw that, OK, now it’s working. Now it’s working, now it can be successful. Now it’s growing. We rewrote it to make it a scalable and to do it right. But when we started we said let’s do it fast. So from idea to publishing our first version, which was very, very crappy version of that, it took us three weeks to do that, very fast. So you test it, see if someone likes it or not. That didn’t have a lot of modules. So as smart as starting as small is the biggest.

Farokh

Factor and the winning hand, because I see many entrepreneurs spending months on market research on development, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and they create something which is half fast. Even by that I know what we’ll use it and the loss.

Pratik

Everything. Wow. So there’s something inside you, OK, like who helped you become who you are today? As a person, as an entrepreneur, creating product, right. What is it, like 3 Key skill sets that every entrepreneur should possess when building the product or being an entrepreneur himself.? Key skill sets that every entrepreneur should possess when building the product or being an entrepreneur himself.

Farokh

So I think the most important part is that before the product create a winning team, I would say that the definition of winning team a team that has the potential to win, to grow. So if you create your core team, your cofounders, the first person that you hire right, those person can grow your company even if you’re not there, even if you’re busy with something else, they can become leaders as the company grow higher. Their own people manage everything as best as you want. So creating the best team, a balanced team that can be a winning can. A team that everyone loves to be a part of. So I love working with that guy. That’s the important part and it comes before the product. Doesn’t matter what the product, the team has to be have to potential of leaders in it. Yeah, that’s the first thing, yeah.

Pratik

And and maybe you wanna share more.

Farokh

I am loving.

Pratik

This conversation so if you wanna share more of your tips, I would love to.

Farokh

And the second part is that again goes into at the pay fast, success faster and you have to really, really, really focus on the product. And there is a saying that says nobody is building a road that someone is not jumping on and someone is not crossed. So the best thing is that. To create a product that people want for that you don’t know what people want, nobody does. So for that you have to fail again and again on the product. And to do that you have to start as small to fail and again on different versions to create something that people really enjoy and love. And that is the winning hand. So you can focus on that. So focus on the product and what people want is very important. And the best thing about it is that you know that market, you know your competitors you know.

Farokh

That market, you know that well, you know, the problems are that market and you’re trying to solve a specific problem and you should ask yourself why do people have that problem and not some other problem. For example, I think Ford says that if I ask people what people wanted back then, they said faster horses, not cars. Yeah, you have to really study the reason behind why people are asked why people have are having that problem and if you solve it. Have the winning hand!

Pratik

Superb! Now maybe I wanna switch to rapid fire round and this is the most exciting part of the show where we get to know a bit more about what is your mindset in terms of entrepreneurship or what is your personal choice towards it. So Are you ready for a quick five question rapid fire. 

Let’s save the Rapid Fire and the stunning wrap-up exclusively for the Podcast. You can watch the full episode on INSIDEA’s YouTube Channel as well as on Spotify.

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