Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Anyone thinking about launching a startup will quickly discover there are a lot of rules. Find a cofounder, raise venture capital and go to Silicon Valley — stat. If you want to succeed, you’d do well to follow the playbook, or else face total, humiliating failure. I was aware of those rules back when I was starting my business back in 2006 — and I ignored them.
As the acclaimed author Toni Morrison wrote in her 1992 novel, Jazz: “What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?” Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are actually a lot of ways to build a successful startup, and I’ve pursued more than a few of them. Here are three choices I’ve made that have bucked the trends, and why I’d make them all over again. From its earliest days, I wanted to make sure Jotform wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan startup that entered the world with a VC-backed bang before quietly fizzling out. In other words, I always viewed my entrepreneurial journey as a long game. For me, this took a few different forms.
For one, Jotform entered the world as a free product. That’s right — I didn’t earn a single cent on it for the first two years of its existence. Why? Frankly, I just wanted to see if people would use it, without the obstacle of a price tag standing in the way. Shortly after its release, I got my answer — a resounding “yes.” Giving Jotform away for free provided invaluable information about the features users wanted, so by the time I was ready to introduce a paid version, I knew exactly what direction to pursue. I also didn’t go to Silicon Valley.
In fact, I went the other way. After I quit my full-time job in New York City, I hopped on a plane in the opposite direction of California’s land of tech, back to my parents’ home in Turkey. If I was going to be giving Jotform away for free, I needed to save money. Was it glamorous? Hardly.
But I was far less interested in creating the appearance of success than I was in actually succeeding. I had faith in my product and my long-term vision, but as a bootstrapped founder, I didn’t want financial stress to cloud my creativity. Now, San Francisco is just one location of Jotform’s seven global offices — and yes, I did eventually move out and buy my own home. For a long time, Jotform was run by an incredibly lean team.
But as it began to grow from just a small handful of employees, I noticed our productivity was stagnating. Building a healthy company culture has always been one of my chief priorities as a founder, so this sudden drop in morale was deeply troubling. In order to get my growing team back on track, I took a hard look at how we functioned when we were smaller, and discovered that the secret to our success had actually been our size. The solution wasn’t to scale back, but to replicate the environment we had when there were only five of us — a team stocked with different roles, each bringing unique strengths, all in the service of a single product. Not only did I break our then-15-person company into groups of three teams; I doubled down on building cohesion by designing an office specifically to accommodate the new structure. I hired an architect to build rooms that could hold a maximum of six people, furnishing each pod with its own whiteboard and glass door. Each person’s workspace was visible to the others on their team — they didn’t have much individual privacy, but that wasn’t really the point.
My goal was to make them feel like their own unit, working toward a common goal. It worked. Creativity and productivity immediately spiked, and from that point forward, I’ve preached the gospel of cross-functional teams to anyone who will listen. Now, we have 130 such teams, and I credit this structure to Jotform’s continued ability to grow and innovate, even after 20 years. In the years after the pandemic, working from home became the rule rather than the exception.
As grateful as I am to have had the flexibility to allow our teams to WFH in 2020, these days, everyone is back in the office. It’s not that we weren’t able to function as a remote-first office; we were. But something was missing, and I noticed it most acutely with new hires. They’d be onboarded from their home offices or kitchen tables, without the warmth of in-person introductions or the ability to ask a nearby colleague about the ins and outs of the intranet. The disconnect was palpable. And so, once it was safe to do so, everyone returned to the office.
Almost immediately, productivity increased and morale shot up. We resumed our tradition of weekly team lunches and product launch celebrations. Working from home may be an attractive option for some companies, but for us, it’s a no-go. Our company culture is simply too intrinsic to our success. I can’t tell anyone else how to run their organization, and I don’t intend to try.
That’s the thing about being a founder: You get to make your own rules. If something isn’t working, change it. Build the business you want to be a part of. Anyone thinking about launching a startup will quickly discover there are a lot of rules.
Find a cofounder, raise venture capital and go to Silicon Valley — stat. If you want to succeed, you’d do well to follow the playbook, or else face total, humiliating failure. I was aware of those rules back when I was starting my business back in 2006 — and I ignored them. As the acclaimed author Toni Morrison wrote in her 1992 novel, Jazz: “What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?” Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are actually a lot of ways to build a successful startup, and I’ve pursued more than a few of them. Here are three choices I’ve made that have bucked the trends, and why I’d make them all over again.
