Meet Albina Zakharenko – AidaForm: Being 100% Customer-Centric Allowed Us to Stay Afloat and Triple our Growth During Pandemic
Today we have selected Albina Zakharenko to take her interview. She is the Co-founder and Marketing Director at AidaForm.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Like everybody nowadays, we wish the situation around COVID-19 would sooner become more stable and life would get into its normal run without the danger and an enormous number of restrictions we presently face. At AidaForm, the pandemic made us reconsider some business processes and adapt to the new realities. This allowed us not only to stay afloat but also to triple our ARR. What is most important, during the pandemic, we, as a team, grew stronger and more supportive of each other.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I’ve been working in online marketing since 2006, and it was more than natural for me to think of service to help other businesses work online. In 2018, I met my former colleagues who were ready to start a new project, and I thought, “Wow! This is a team of specialists with superpowers. We must do it now! “ This is how AidaForm — an online service for creating forms, surveys, quizzes, and landing pages — was founded.
How does your company innovate?
We develop an extremely easy-to-use service that allows users to create online forms ranging from very simple to quite sophisticated.
AidaForm Form Builder allows users to create a wide variety of forms, surveys, quizzes, and pages with complex navigation logic, calculations, and custom after submission actions, but you don’t have to master AidaForm before you create your first form. Our users may have different levels of knowledge and skills, but they will easily find and use the functionality they need at every level.
The cherry on the top is that AidaForms looks modern and eye-catching, and you can switch between conversational and traditional layouts with one click of the mouse.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
During the Coronavirus pandemic, small businesses that had traditionally been working offline, for example, small bakeries, farm shops, yoga trainers, etc., faced the urgent need to be present online. We started getting more and more customers who did not know about online marketing and creating online forms. We had to figure out how we could quickly help our clients fulfill their needs. Our team always listened carefully to our customers’ requirements, conducted customer development interviews and surveys, but the new situation made us 100 percent customer-centric. We had to create dozens of new ready-to-use templates to use instead of creating their forms and shops from scratch. We reconsidered our development plans every two weeks. For example, it took us two weeks to release functionality to create simple online shops with checkout pages that competing form builders did not have and were highly in demand.
Our major challenge was not connected with the difficulties of running our business but with the necessity of quickly learning how we could help our customers cope with the situation caused by the pandemic.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
AidaForm is a young and growing business. Managing a startup is always about making choices! It was not easy for us to stop strictly following our once approved development plan and begin quickly dealing with demands that appeared under new conditions. We realized there was a danger that agility might turn into inconsistency. But time proved that we did it right. The pandemic made our development process even more flexible and brought our team even closer to our customers.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
I would not say we needed special anti-crisis tools to work more effectively. We have had a distributed team of specialists located in different cities and countries since day one. At AidaForm, we use Trello to track and manage our tasks, and we also conduct weekly video meetings to coordinate our work.
What has really changed is that to be more customer-centric, we had to reconsider the role of our customer support specialists, who are now involved more deeply with the problems facing our customers’ businesses.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Typeform and Jotform are the most well-known. We love our competitors, but we are not going to replicate them. AidaForm is a modern service built on modern technologies with a flexible architecture. We will use these advantages to create more niche specialized applications to conduct market and personnel screening and assessments.
Your final thoughts
Having an online presence and getting online customers nowadays is essential for any business. At AidaForm, we are happy that our service helps small and medium businesses to reach new horizons and cope with the consequences of the pandemic.
- Spokesperson: Albina Zakharenko
- Company: AidaForm
- Website link: https://aidaform.com/
