Wufoo，自举式表单构建器，融资11.8万美元，以3500万美元卖给SurveyMonkey

做的是什么生意

Wufoo is an online HTML form builder: businesses and non-developers use it to create contact forms, surveys, event registrations and simple payment pages without writing code, with data stored and exported for them.

启动资金：$118,000 total: $18,000 from Y Combinator (W06) and $100,000 from two angels, including Paul Buchheit. The company never raised again.

起因

Kevin Hale, Chris Campbell and Ryan Campbell were running Particle Tree, a web design tutorial and magazine business, when investor Paul Graham suggested they build a web app for creating forms. The team initially dismissed the category as 'crappy' — then realized that was exactly the opportunity: if every existing form builder was bad, a company that made an exceptional one would stand out.

经过

Wufoo took $18,000 from Y Combinator and $100,000 from angels (Paul Buchheit among them) and launched in 2006. The product combined a drag-and-drop form builder with real database power, payment processing, SSL and data export, priced on freemium tiers from free up to $199.95 a month. The three founders wrote handwritten thank-you cards to customers, kept support in-house, and reached profitability within nine months; revenue then grew more than 10% month over month without any further outside funding.

结果

On 25 April 2011 SurveyMonkey acquired Wufoo for $35 million in cash and stock, a deal TechCrunch confirmed with a source. The founders' total external capital was $118,000, and the company had processed more than $100 million in transactions through its forms by the time of the sale.

可借鉴之处

一个'糟糕'的类别是邀请，而不是警告：Wufoo凭借11.8万美元将卓越的用户体验变成了一项盈利业务，因为它从一开始就收费，并且从未将融资误认为产品市场契合。