Unlocking business insights with Farokh – The man behind Formaloo!

Get to know important strategies that can help you leverage your business with INSIDEA’s Founder and CEO, Pratik Thakker.

This podcast talks about the new emerging trend of no-code platform. Farokh, the founder of Formaloo, which is a no-code platform shares his insights and key learnings of running a successful startup.

You can watch the full episode on INSIDEA’s YouTube Channel as well as on Spotify.

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