FormsCentral is Shutting Down

If you’re here because of the announcement that Adobe FormsCentral is shutting down–we’re sorry to hear it. I’ve read the comments of disgruntled customers who have their online forms and workflows set up for the entire year, only to learn that Adobe will discontinue service half way through 2015. Ouch!

The good news is there are a lot of other form builders out there that do exactly what Adobe FormsCentral does. The better news is that Adobe shutting down FormsCentral proves our hypothesis here at Blitzen.

What hypothesis? Well, online forms, despite being the primary way users communicate with websites and companies, have remained relatively stagnant in both form and function over the years. Adobe, being the smart company that they are, realize they have to deviate significantly from their core competency (Adobe Creative Suite) in order to compete long term with startups like Blitzen. Startups that are only working to push these workflows into the future.

As has happened over and over again in the history of innovation, the giants are giving way to the little but oh-so-focused companies. The little ones are destined to run away with the market–it’s just a matter of when.

Why Blitzen is your Adobe FormsCentral Alternative

If it’s not clear yet, we aren’t Adobe. We are a small but growing team working day and night, giving form-based workflow automation the attention it deserves. Our vision has taken us through Communitech’s Velocity Garage, one of Canada’s premier technology incubators. From there, we spent nine weeks in NYC, getting mentored at one of the world’s most prestigious technology accelerators in the world, AngelPad. We were even chosen to be Canada’s only representative in South Korea for a startup competition!

I don’t say this to brag. It’s just, a regular old form building company of yesteryear doesn’t get these exciting opportunities. We aren’t doing what’s already been done. We’re bringing something new and significant to the table–very significant!

Our product road map is entrenched in delivering a powerful and easy-to-use workflow builder that can automatically and intelligently send form and survey data to your favourite web apps–and that’s just the very beginning.

We think it’s plain silly that extremely talented and experienced professionals have to do manual data entry they could have pulled off fresh out of high school. It’s 2015 and it’s time to eliminate this. Everyone should be free to do more of what they were hired to do.

Can you tell we love this stuff?

No matter who you talk to here, you’re talking to someone whose livelihood depends on understanding online forms and workflow automation, and pushing them into the future. We don’t have a Creative Suite equivalent to fall back on. Absolutely everyone here is focused on this one thing.

We’re building Blitzen with our ear to the ground, listening for where web technology is going and deciding where forms fit into that picture. I can tell you online forms are here to stay, but they will definitely be a heck of a lot more powerful, easy-to-use, and integrated than Adobe FormsCentral and company.

How You Can Get Started

And that’s why I hope you’ll keep an eye on what we’re doing.

When we’re ready, we’ll bring your forms to Blitzen and usher your team into the future of automated workflows. We’re working hard to be ready before Adobe pulls the plug on July 28, 2015.

Sign up and stay up to date on major Blitzen stories and product development. You’ll also be notified when we’re ready to bring you over.

We’d love to hear from you and see how we can help out. Just say “hello” at hello@blitzen.com.

If others in your network may be negatively impacted by Adobe ending FormsCentral, we’d appreciate you sharing this post. Thank you.

Next week, I’ll be talking about the experience of our first live user, us! Our lead capture form on our website is automatically sending form and survey data to Pipedrive (CRM), MailChimp (Email Marketing), Google Spreadsheets, and Slack (Internal Communication) as soon as it’s submitted. All of our apps updated from a single lead capture form without any manual data entry!