Forms are a more intrinsic part of our day-to-day lives than we realise. Forms are used in so many ways to collect data. Digitally or on paper, forms have existed since at least the early 19th century, originally used to simplify the task of drafting complaints and various other legal pleadings.
When you unlock your phone, that’s a form. Logging in to Twitter or Facebook? That is a form. Withdrawing money from the ATM? Also a form. We use forms everyday, whether we realize it or not, and it’s amazing how little we know about forms. But that’s talk for another day. Today, the story is about a Nigerian data collection startup that is using its forms to power data collection in 70 countries worldwide–including two of the biggest ride-hailing companies in the world. This is the story of Formplus.
Winning The Benjamins
It all began in 2012 when five UNILAG undergraduates participated in the Google Apps Developer Challenge with the first version of the FormPlus product. CEO Busayo Longe told me it was just a form that collected data and stored it in an excel sheet. Now, it is a more robust software program that acts as a pipe through which a user can create/fill forms and store/port data however they please. They won the first place prize of $20K and while the money sat in the bank, the product began to reach other parts of the world, thanks to PR from the Google event.
Usage kept climbing and in 2013, Longe – who was the last member to join the original team, pushed for more focus on the product. He figured there was an opportunity, one whose scale he didn’t fully grasp at the time. Unfortunately, that sentiment wasn’t shared by the rest of the team. Three of the original co-founders decided to take their share of the Google prize money and walk, leaving Longe and would-be co-founder Bolu Ogunsola with the IP.
A Jumia Stint
Longe did a short stint at Jumia that same year as an online marketing specialist where he managed Jumia’s Google display ads. He said he didn’t like the working environment and he spent just three months there before he and Ogunsola began work on Formplus with what was left of the latter’s share of the Google prize money.
If he ever built a business, it would be one where he would want to stay, Longe said. At the time though, he had no idea that he would eventually build his own business, let alone one with the kind of success Formplus has had.
Building Formplus
They both started to build Formplus from CcHub in Yaba, Lagos. Ogunsola was responsible for everything software while Longe handled everything else – operations, accounting, marketing, sales and so on. Requests kept piling up and people in various countries all over the world kept using Formplus for various things. Schools were using it for student applications, companies were using it for internal processes and workflows, and non-profit organisations were using Formplus in the field. By 2014, Longe had started to play with the idea of pricing, using some basic excel math to determine the initial paid plans for Formplus. “I wasn’t even convinced that people would want to pay for Formplus. It was totally random and when we made $80 on the first day, I was like ‘We might actually have something here’,” he said.
But the momentum would not skyrocket from there as life had other plans for the two founders. They weren’t making a lot of money with Formplus and Longe supplemented his income with side gigs, including one at TechCabal. Then Ogunsola had to move to Poland after accepting a role at Codility, a software platform that helps technical recruiters hire and train stronger engineers. Soon enough, Longe also went to the UK for his master’s degree.
At this point they were both still the only ones building and developing Formplus. Ogunsola did what he could (considering the time difference and) his full time job in Poland and Longe did same alongside his studies. The rest of the engineering they handled through Upwork (Elance at the time). But a little bit of fortune was about to come their way. The University Of Leeds took an interest in the company and Longe was selected to participate in its Spark Accelerator program after his master’s program. “At some point, during my masters program, someone at the University of Leeds where I was studying used the product and somehow, the university picked up on it and they liked it. They helped me set up an office and basically everything I needed to run Formplus from the UK – including helping me with an entrepreneur visa that allowed me to travel between the UK and Nigeria,” said Longe.
Change in Plans
But there was more afoot. Formplus usage was growing at an accelerated pace. Customers needed to be managed. Feature requests were becoming near-endless. They were spending lots of money on software engineering and it was becoming less sustainable as their user base grew further. Ogunsola and Longe are good friends so they had a conversation about the future of the Formplus. Ogunsola decided to remain in Europe and left the business to Longe. By this time, Longe had decided to move back to Nigeria and focus solely on building Formplus.
Longe had decided to bring software engineering in-house while still in the UK. They had been spending a lot of money on maintaining Formplus’ codebase as well as the development of new features. During one of Longe’s trips from the UK in early 2016, he’d made Formplus’ first hire to provide technical support. This led to Longe moving the company to iDEA Hub briefly, from CcHub. From there, Formplus moved to Surulere and would call it home for a while.
On another of those trips he hired Emmanuel Olowosulu who now leads software engineering at Formplus. He was Longe’s most senior hire at the time and the fifth since Longe began to build out the team in early 2016. Eventually, Longe moved back to Nigeria in mid-2017 (he had been running the company from the UK for about a year and half after his Master’s program) to focus on Formplus.
Fun Fact: Dev Lead Olowosulu actually helped the team buy the original Formplus domain back in 2012.
Later in 2016, Longe noticed a spike on the Formplus backend. The spike was coming from South East Asia and after closer investigation, Longe realised Go-Jek, an Indonesian ride-hailing company Longe had never heard of at the time, was the culprit. Shortly after, Careem, another ride-hailing company, this time operating out of the Middle East and North Africa, also started to use Formplus’ software. Longe realized he had to pick up the pace. Enterprise usage on the scale of Go-Jek and Careem was not common among its users but the revenue potential was huge. All of this had happened without any marketing and usage had grown strictly off referrals and word of mouth. He had to step up to the challenge.
Getting Down To Business
In 2017, Longe formalized all aspects of the business, including registration in the UK and US. A board (which includes Victor Asemota, Femi Taiwo and Kenneth Kinyanjui) was constituted, he and Olowosulu started to build out the team and applied to pitch at TechCrunch Battlefield 2017. It was at the event Formplus debuted their offline forms: “In [structuring the company] I’d come to realize that there was an interesting part of the market that no one was paying attention to and it was in my backyard – Africa. Our biggest issues here are internet and power, which is why most people own feature phones. We thought why not build a Formplus that could appeal to that market and we demoed the solution at TechCrunch Battlefield in 2017,” said Longe.
Formplus by the digits
- 70K+ users
- 14 million forms filled and counting
- ~900 paying users
- 89% user retention
- 12 months – average user lifetime
- 2017 launched offline forms in beta
- Largest market by revenue (60%) is the US
Today, Formplus is still growing rapidly. The team has grown to 13 members, including Longe who is one of only 5 men at the company. Longe says this is intentional: “One of the biggest things that stuck with me across my previous work experiences is the importance of company culture. We don’t hire based on anything other than the person’s ability to do the job and be empathetic to other people. Everyone that works at Formplus does so because they genuinely want to. I am very keen on building an inclusive culture that doesn’t exclude talent based on certain prejudices.”
Some use cases
Nigeria:
– Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) used Formplus to gather investor data for the ERGP focus labs (launched earlier this year).
SE Asia:
– Go-Jek, Careem, Grab Taxi: Management of Drivers (registration, reporting, onboarding, customer data collection)
Yemen:
– Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA): Recruitment and administration
Canada:
– Niagara College: Partnerships and reporting
United States:
– Lakeland Collegiate High School: Enrolment, applications, administration
This desire to build inclusivity into Formplus also stems from what some have called “The Nigerian Factor”. Across the world, people are usually suspicious of Nigerians thanks to a popular scam-based stereotype and this perception affects Formplus too. “A lot of the time, people become sceptical when they find out we are a Nigerian company – even if they have been using the product before. It’s understandable because these people use our forms for all kinds of sensitive data. But that doesn’t mean we hide that we are Nigerians. It’s right there on the website, my full name and everything. If we don’t do our best to dispel those stereotypes, we’ll also have to deal with it down the line. At home or abroad we have to represent the things we stand for and doing that with Formplus is important to me,” Longe said.
Formplus participated in the just-concluded second cohort of the Google Launchpad Africa Accelerator program. Longe is also part of Germany-based Westerwelle Foundation’s Young Entrepreneur program and is looking to build out Formplus’ offline capabilities in the near term. Longe says the company is still growing quickly and he is thinking of establishing local presence in South East Asia which is Formplus’ largest region by volume. And he is looking to take outside capital to make that happen – it just has to be “the right kind”. “Raising investment can be a lot of work but we do need to take advantage of those markets. These customers barely speak any English and there is a lot more business we could be getting if we can be closer to them and understand their needs better. In the end, we are based in Nigeria but we are a global company because people use forms everywhere in the world – on or offline,” he said.
Through a uniquely useful product and a founder’s desire to change the narrative about Nigerians and Nigerian businesses, Formplus is demonstrating reach, scale and growth never before seen in these parts. The journey ahead will be arduous and it will need to be smart about its strategies but for now, it is challenging incumbents like Google Forms, serving some of the biggest companies in the world and laying the template for what it is to be a Nigerian company catering to the international market.
The post The Formplus Story: From CcHub To Powering Data Collection For A $5 Billion Dollar Company appeared first on TechCabal.
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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