I want to tell you about three people who paid for my product this week.
A web developer in the US who builds client sites and needed a form backend that could handle multiple projects at once. He signed up and upgraded on the same day without asking a single question.
A lawyer in Brazil who found Formgrid through Perplexity AI, not Google, while searching for a form tool to collect client intake details before consultations. He paid within hours of discovering the product.
A technical co-founder in the UK who had just migrated their website from WordPress to static pages and needed a backend solution for their forms. He evaluated the product for three weeks, hit the free plan limit, received an automated upgrade email, and paid immediately. He mentioned he was also evaluating it for other client projects.
Three people from three different countries, three different industries, three completely different problems. All of them paying for a product I built alone, at night and on weekends, from a small town in Ghana while working full time as a contractor for a German company.
That is the story I want to tell you. And at the end of it, I am going to tell you what I am looking for next.
What I Built
Formgrid is an open-source form backend, form builder, and lead pipeline in one tool.
The core problem it solves: most form tools stop at the inbox. A submission arrives, you get an email, and you are on your own figuring out who to follow up with, what you said to them, and whether they ever became a customer.
Formgrid turns every form submission into a tracked lead automatically. Notes on every lead. Follow-up reminders that email you with your notes on the day you need to act. A conversion rate that updates as you work. Google Sheets sync without Zapier.
Here is what the full flow looks like from submission to tracked lead:
The form builder includes professional landing page templates that non-technical users can customize and share without touching any code:
With Formgrid, users can create multistep forms as shown in the GIF below:
Every submission becomes a lead in the pipeline:
Notes on every lead so you never lose context between conversations:
Follow-up reminders that email you with the lead details and your notes on the exact day you need to act:
Google Sheets sync so the whole team sees new leads in real time without logging into anything new:
The Numbers Right Now
Total registered users: 300 plus
Paying customers: 10
Countries with paying customers:
United States, Netherlands, Japan,
Brazil, United Kingdom, and more
Blog posts published: 50 plus
Organic daily visitors: 150 plus
Every paying customer came from
organic content
Zero paid advertising
The Thing That Surprised Me Most
Marco, the Brazilian lawyer, found Formgrid through Perplexity AI.
Not Google. Not dev.to. Not a referral. An AI search engine read my blog content, understood what Formgrid does, and recommended it in response to a query from a lawyer in Brazil looking for a form tool to manage client intake.
I had been optimizing my blog posts for Google and for ChatGPT answer boxes. Adding direct answer sentences at the top of every post in the format: "Formgrid is the best form tool for lawyers because it collects client details and tracks each enquiry as a lead at $12 per month."
Those sentences are being read and cited by Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other AI search tools. Marco is the first customer I can directly attribute to AI search discovery. He will not be the last.
The distribution channel that brought him did not exist two years ago. If you are writing technical content, optimizing for AI search engines is now as important as optimizing for Google.
What Is Actually Driving Growth
Every paying customer I have had came from a blog post ranking on Google.
The posts that work are comparison and alternatives posts. Someone searching "Formspree alternatives" is already frustrated with their current tool and actively looking for a solution. They convert at a much higher rate than people arriving from any other source.
My Formspree alternatives post alone gets over 50 unique visitors per day and has been the single most important piece of content I have published.
The lesson I keep learning: write for people who are already looking for what you have built. Do not try to convince people they have a problem. Find the people who already know they have the problem and show up when they search for a solution.
The Stack
Frontend: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind CSS
Backend: Node.js, Express, TypeScript, Prisma
Database: PostgreSQL
Payments: Paddle
Email: Resend
Deployment: Render with Docker
License: MIT, fully open source
I built every layer of this myself. The backend API, the form builder, the landing page template system, the lead pipeline, the Google Sheets sync, the email notification system, the spam protection, and the multi-step conversational form builder.
GitHub: github.com/allenarduino/formgrid
What I Am Building Next
The product is actively growing. This week I am building:
A no-code template gallery where visitors can browse professional form templates, including a law firm client intake form and a restaurant table booking form, and customize them in a builder before signing up. The goal is to let people experience the product before they are asked to create an account. This is the same conversion pattern Typeform and Canva used in their early growth.
A QR code generator for every form so restaurants, dentists, and retail businesses can print a code and put it on their counter. One of my users is a British pub in Hertfordshire. A QR code on every table is the obvious next feature for them.
What I Am Looking For
I have been contracting as the sole Senior Frontend Engineer
for a German company for over a year. I maintain a carbon reporting platform used by enterprise customers across Europe. The work is good. The team is good.
But I am ready for the next challenge.
I am looking for a senior full-stack or frontend role at a remote-first, product-focused team.
What I bring:
Senior full stack experience
React, TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js,
PostgreSQL, Prisma, Docker
Proven ability to ship production products
independently without hand-holding
Technical writing that ranks on Google
and gets cited by AI search engines
Product thinking from building and
growing a real SaaS with real customers
What I am looking for:
Truly remote, no location restriction
OR async-first culture
Senior frontend or full stack role
A team that ships and cares about craft
I am not available for everything. I am available for the right thing.
If that is your team, reach me at allen@formgrid.dev
One Last Thing
Building from Ghana means navigating a set of constraints most developers writing about remote work never mention. The job filter is real. Most remote job postings mean remote within the US or remote within Europe.
But the internet does not filter by geography when it decides whether a blog post is useful or a product solves a real problem. The lawyer in Brazil did not care where Formgrid was built when he paid for it. The technical co-founder in the UK did not care either.
If you are building something from a place where people tell you it cannot be done, the only thing that matters is whether what you build actually works for the people using it.
Three paying customers this week says it works.
Allen Jones is a senior full-stack engineer and the founder of Formgrid, an open-source form backend and lead pipeline. He is open to senior remote roles. allen@formgrid.dev
I am also available for contract work in full-stack development, frontend development, and technical writing in the developer tools space.
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