Forms have been out there for a while. Google Forms launched in 2008, and is still kicking with little to no changes to it’s design or features. Typeform launched in 2014 and has raised +180$M to the date. ¿Can anyone else innovate in the Forms space?

Forms are the most basic way of collecting information of any sort. They’re explicit, straight to the point, can be designed, and answers can be processed later on with the help of some integration system. However, the generation of the form, and managing the form itself has never been easy. It’s such a simple thing that most people creating forms in their own apps or websites wouldn’t choose to use an external service. This has been mainly due to the lack of flexibility.

The main problem with Forms is found in the design phase. This problem is not new, and happens across the board in the industry of web development. We want to create something that’s dynamic, but want to remove the burden of managing assets, changing the process or adapting to change behind the scenes. You can think about forms as the simplified version of the Web App and CMS tuple.

Last week I stumbled upon Fillout, the new kid in the block. And oh my, what interesting offering it has. Amongst it’s many features, it has one that other form applications lack (standalone or embeded¹): an easy to use, and very simple way to pull data from a source and have it power your form.

On the right you can see my databases in Notion, which contain each product I have – on the left, a simple form in Fillout, that goes through all the possible values the Product field can take in my Shopping list.

I could be writing about this for hours. Fillout is going to rock it. I’m really looking forward to experimenting with this and see what awesome yet useless examples I can build. 🎉

Copy the Fillout Grocery List template, and/or test it out here. If you are reading this on my personal website, there is a chance embeds are still not supported, so you will see an ugly message below this point. If you are reading this in Notion, you should see two awesome forms just below this text 👇

1. Other apps like Airtable, or Retool, allow you to create forms connecting to their own resources, however none have the flexibility Fillout presents.