FormLis a lisp based startup in Calgary

[WarrenWilkinson]

I've been trying to get the word out about my Lisp based software
startup in Calgary. It's called FormLis (www.formlis.com) and it is a
database with a wiki interface. For example if you wrote this:

Company Phone Book
===================

* Don't list your home number if you are not a salaried employee.

Name: ________________________
Office: ______Calgary________ [v]
_______Edmonton_____
_______Toronto_______
Phone: _______________________ (Home)
Phone: _______________________ (Office)


FormLis would produce a page with a title 'Company Phone Book', a
bulleted note 'Don't list ...' and then 4 form Fields, Name, Office
and Phone x2. You can fill out the form, save your answers (and
change them later) and FormLis produces nice reports on the data. The
reports can be sorted, categorized, given totals, exported to csv...
etc.

You can see a gallery of demo's I've created using it at www.demo.formlis.com.
I've written a few tutorials on its usage at www.tutorial.formlis.com.
And there is a sandbox to play in at www.sandbox.formlis.com.

I'm looking for people interested in working on this software. I'm
also looking for introductions to investors/Angels, or just general
startup advice. If you can help me by all means, don't delay, reply!

Thanks for your help,
Warren Wilkinson

[Daniel Gackle]

Hi Warren,

It looks like interesting technology. In my opinion, you need a killer app

for this type of form markup, something that is very easy to do this way

and hard to do some other way. For example, could it be used to convert legacy

form documents? The thing about the examples you show is that they

look very much like what people build in MS Word, or of course on paper.

Have you considered interoperating with MS Word somehow?

If I were you, I'd post a "Ask HN: Review my web-based form software startup"

to news.ycombinator.com. You'll get shredded, but there is typically a lot of 

intelligent feedback as well.

Daniel

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[wag...@telusplanet.net]

Thanks for the feedback. I actually did post to Hacker News, but perhaps not under a good title (I just said 'checkout my startup & anybody in Calgary?')
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1423979. I might repost under a better title.

A killer app: my dad though Safety incident tracking was a good fit. Most construction companies are supposed to track it. A benefit of my program is a) Online (so multiuser) B) fancy views (automated, and generally beyond what you could do in Excel), C) Flexible --- you can change fields, add fields, delete fields during the life cycle of your form. You don't have to worry about corrupting or migrating data, nor do you need a programmer to do it.

I haven't considered interoperating with MS word. Do you mean like MS Word would be another 'client', or like a big button toolbar in MS-Word that says 'Put this on FormLis'?

Thank you so much,
Warren Wilkinson

Jun 15, 2010 11:29:27 AM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

Hi Warren,
It looks like interesting technology. In my opinion, you need a killer appfor this type of form markup, something that is very easy to do this wayand hard to do some other way. For example, could it be used to convert legacyform documents? The thing about the examples you show is that theylook very much like what people build in MS Word, or of course on paper.Have you considered interoperating with MS Word somehow?

[Daniel Gackle]

Here's a detailed description of what I meant, but keep in mind this

is off the top of my head and is just a single example of the kind

of killer app you need for your technology.

What I was suggesting is that perhaps you could extend your code to

read in a Word doc and detect the "forms", i.e. the text that is set up

like forms with lots of underscores for the various blanks, and import

that into your tool in a way that can be published to the web (and indeed

transformed in a host of ways). 

It's possible that this is unrealistic, and that the things people do in Word

are just too unstructured for a tool to detect. It would be a bit like OCR or

face-recognition software, only it would be form-recognition and would work

with text rather than pixels. Still, this kind of thing is a good fit for a Lisp

program, if it's doable at all. Supposing it's doable, I think you'd get some

huge benefits from it:

1. People could plug in the docs they already have and get immediate value

    without having to learn your tool. That is huge.

2. There are a zillion Word docs floating around the web, so you won't lack

    for data to test.

3. It will make for a compelling demo. Instead of demoing your format, you'd

    simply make a Word doc and upload it. Better still, upload some Word doc

    you've never seen before and show that it captures the info.

With what you've shown us so far, your big hurdle is going to be convincing 

people to learn your format. The advantage of the above idea is that they wouldn't have

to learn your format; you (or rather Formlis) would learn theirs.

There would be ugly glue code needed to interoperate with Office. But

other startups (Xobni, Docverse) have shown that this is a pretty good path

for delivering immediate value, and that it gets people's attention. 

In short, Word is where the users are. Don't expect them to come to you; go to them.

Dan

[Daniel Gackle]

One more thought. These things come to me 5 seconds after I hit Send :)

The big difference from what you've got already is that you wouldn't specify a format.

Instead, you'd try to make sense of the wide, chaotic variety of formats that people

already use informally. A bottom-up approach.

There is a startup out there (I forget its name) that implemented web-crawling-in-a-box.

That is, they have a web spider that they rent out, you tell it what you're looking for,

and they crawl for you. I wonder if it would be possible to crawl the web and find

Word documents whose text contains "______". That might give you a nice corpus

of data to work with.

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

As far as killer apps go, I do have some ideas:

* You can create a whole application by just copy/pasting. You can then modify it slighly to suit your tastes.
* I don't use any javascript, flash or java. So it works basically everywhere (Palm Pilots, ipads, iphones).

So I was thinking of showcasing that --- If you want to track driver deliveries (say), they an use FormLis in combination wih their existing phones.
Or option B. A company that just wants to conform to some set standard for safety can just copy/paste a prebuilt form for that into their own space.

---

I built the application to do easily, the tasks I did as an intern at Black & McDonald; and I gave them a wiki, which they love. I like the idea of easier integration but I'm not convinced that wiki syntax is a deal breaker. Also implementing that sort of integration would come at the expense of other features: File uploads and a capability or role based security model.

This or that, you know? How about your application I suspect you have Excel integration going? Was that easy, or insanely difficult?

Thanks for your input,
Warren Wilkinson

[Vladimir Sedach]

Something worth doing is focusing the demo examples into a single
compelling one. Right now you have too many half-finished demos. It's
hard to see from them a demonstration of the main capabilities of
Formlis and why you'd want to pay for it. Focus on what you did for
Black & McDonald, as that's where you've got the most feedback from
potential customers.

I just noticed the Formlis page says "We do have companies using it
for the past 2 months." Can you use them as use case examples?

Vladimir

2010/6/15 <wag...@telusplanet.net>:

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

I think your absolutely right. I thought I would focus first on the behavior based safety market. Generally it involves some surveys. I created a site
here http://www.bbsdemo.formlis.com/ (I'll be creating some views soon)

However, the only strategy I know for getting in touch would be cold calling, and I'm nervous. Any advice?

Cheers,
Warren Wilkinson


Jun 15, 2010 07:28:08 PM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

[Daniel Gackle]

< However, the only strategy I know for getting in touch would be cold calling, and I'm nervous. Any advice? >

Blogs and forums in the industries/communities that contain your target users?

Also, if you're nervous (perfectly natural starting out), a good compromise

is to get in touch to ask for advice/feedback rather than sales. It might be

easier to focus on just talking to as many different people as you can than

to go straight for buyers. Oftentimes that can lead to sales anyway, but at 

least it will get you in the habit of talking to people.

Just expect that the overwhelming majority of people you try to talk to

will be too busy and/or uninterested - it's the way these things go!

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

Yeah, its the 'booming silence' of the start up world. I do plan to attend the python users group, Linux users group, and Programmers linux group in Calgary to try to network. I found if you search 'Calgary business directory' or something like that, the government has a list --- so I have 900 pages of phone numbers divided into power-generation, manufactoring, etc.

Thanks for the help guy,
Warren Wilkinson

Jun 16, 2010 08:57:38 AM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

Blogs and forums in the industries/communities that contain your target users?

Also, if you're nervous (perfectly natural starting out), a good compromiseis to get in touch to ask for advice/feedback rather than sales. It might beeasier to focus on just talking to as many different people as you can thanto go straight for buyers. Oftentimes that can lead to sales anyway, but at least it will get you in the habit of talking to people.
Just expect that the overwhelming majority of people you try to talk towill be too busy and/or uninterested - it's the way these things go!

[Daniel Gackle]

I really think you'd be better off avoiding the programmers and talking to business people!

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

Yeah, as I'm putting together this cold call list, I starting to feel like I'll have opportunities to talk to real potential clients. Its probably better to specialize and sell the product to businesses, than it is to try to sell it as-is using contacts made through programmers.

You seem pretty smart about this whole thing. Have you been down this road before?

Cheers,
Warren Wilkinson

Jun 16, 2010 09:33:35 AM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

[Vladimir Sedach]

Get the book I recommended, Four Steps to the Epiphany. It has a good
guide for how to go about making initial customer contacts, and what
to talk about.

Vladimir

2010/6/16 <wag...@telusplanet.net>:

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

I found and read the first four chapters online. I'll see what I can do about the rest.

Cheers,
Warren Wilkinson

Jun 16, 2010 11:13:57 AM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

[Wade Humeniuk]

Hi Warren,

Is the intention to create a template of a Wiki Form that when filled out is stored as a Web Page.  Is there any code in the background which analyzes the form and builds a database "object" against the template (independent of the form)?  I think it does as you can request all instances of the page in a CSV report and the ability to create views.

At my current job we have a forms designer much like that.  It was originally build for a terminal interface (a few decades ago) and is still used.  The screen is translated into a WIndows Form (using a non-proportional font).

I played with your demos a bit and its interesting.  I tried to do something like this

Name: _______  Site: ________

Lat: _____ Lon: _____

But it did not show as I expected (only one entry per line?)

Does anyone know if the fancy javascript libraries allow one to build a forms designer (analogy Visual Studio) ?

Wade

[wag...@telusplanet.net]

Hey Wade,

Thanks for trying it out; what you submit is stored in the database as a tree structure: (list* field-name field-value children).

I do analyze the page source to present the page, but there is no schema in the background. If you wanted you could submit a hand-crafted response and it would be stored just the same. Also because there is no schema, you can add or delete fields freely.

Your not the first to ask about multiple fields per line. Its in my nice-to-have pile but I haven't thought of a good way to do it. It adds complexity to the page parser, and it
adds complexity to the html-outputting step. To really nail it I would need a breakthrough on the parsing front. A stop-gap measure I might add would be the ability to tell a page you wanted something like 4,2,2,2... and have the output would reflect that.

Whats the name of that form creator you have? Does it do reports? Where does it store its data?

Switching to JS to design forms is one way to go, but It adds other problems and could hurt copy/paste-ability of pages and forms. I'm undecided about it.

Cheers,
Warren Wilkinson


Jun 19, 2010 06:56:58 AM, calgary-lis...@googlegroups.com wrote:

===========================================

Hi Warren,
Is the intention to create a template of a Wiki Form that when filled out is stored as a Web Page. Is there any code in the background which analyzes the form and builds a database "object" against the template (independent of the form)? I think it does as you can request all instances of the page in a CSV report and the ability to create views.
At my current job we have a forms designer much like that. It was originally build for a terminal interface (a few decades ago) and is still used. The screen is translated into a WIndows Form (using a non-proportional font).
I played with your demos a bit and its interesting. I tried to do something like this

Name: _______ Site: ________Lat: _____ Lon: _____

But it did not show as I expected (only one entry per line?)
Does anyone know if the fancy javascript libraries allow one to build a forms designer (analogy Visual Studio) ?
Wade