Stoneforms

My First SaaS Product and the Lessons It Taught Me

Stoneforms was the first real SaaS product I built from scratch. A drag-and-drop form builder with built-in analytics, conditional logic, and embeddable widgets. I was genuinely excited about it — the builder interface was slick, the analytics dashboard showed conversion funnels and drop-off points, and the embedding experience was seamless.

What I Built

The feature set was solid for a form builder:

• Drag-and-drop builder — intuitive interface for creating multi-step forms with conditional logic
• Analytics dashboard — submission rates, completion funnels, field-level drop-off analysis, time-to-complete metrics
• Embeddable widgets — drop a script tag on any site and the form renders beautifully
• Integrations — webhooks, email notifications, Zapier, and direct database connections
• Templates — pre-built form templates for common use cases like contact forms, surveys, and lead capture

The Market Reality

Here's the thing about form builders: the market is absolutely saturated. Typeform, Tally, JotForm, Google Forms, Cognito Forms, Paperform — the list goes on. And several of them are either free or have generous free tiers backed by venture capital. Competing on features is a losing game when your competitors have 100x your engineering resources.

I spent months building features to match competitors instead of finding a genuine differentiator. By the time I realised the positioning was wrong, I'd invested significant time and energy into a product that was good but not distinct enough to carve out meaningful market share.

The Decision to Pause

Putting Stoneforms into maintenance mode was one of the hardest decisions I've made as a founder. It's still running, still serving users, and still processing form submissions. But I'm not actively developing new features or marketing it. The resources are better deployed on ventures where I have a genuine competitive advantage — domain expertise in hospitality, unique data assets, or technical moats.

What It Taught Me

Stoneforms was the best education I could have asked for. It taught me full-stack SaaS development, subscription billing, user onboarding, customer support, and the brutal economics of competing in a crowded market. Every product I've built since then is better because of the mistakes I made here. The build quality of Bytable, LUFU, and LittleSpoon all trace back to patterns I learned and refined on Stoneforms.

Still Running, Still Valuable

The product still works, still has active users, and still generates a small amount of recurring revenue. I handle support requests when they come in and keep the infrastructure maintained. It's a reminder that not every product needs to be a moonshot — sometimes a modest, stable product that runs itself is a perfectly good outcome.