

Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s - auston
http://imjustcreative.com/turbo-boost-incoming-freelance/2009/01/22/

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patio11
_This is my only grumble with WuFoo; ... the only option up from the ‘free’ is
the $9.95. May not seem much, but ...it’s certainly overkill...

It’s not a cheap option by any means_

Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have
kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me
than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't
let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that
doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay
money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)

~~~
h34t
All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should
cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this
himself.

~~~
patio11
That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid-
well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.

You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:

1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email
address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks

2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice

3) you actually know what a server is

4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"

5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it
through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and
then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient
list

Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum
of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when
starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or
security"?

~~~
h34t
That's true. It's easy to forget how difficult this would be without
experience.

Still, $120/year to enable a single web contact form seems excessive (his
isn't free b/c it has more than 10 fields). You could embed a form from Google
Docs for free.

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tdavis
He could double them again if he stopped asking for superfluous and lengthy
information such as an address just to receive a quote...

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thomasmallen
_Correction_

Web Forms Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s

~~~
sgk284
Yes, it's important to note that the only previous way of getting a quote from
him was directly contacting him. A lot of people don't want this. Also the
forms makes it explicit what his costs are and what he is capable of doing.

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h34t
I saw a ~7x jump in online enquiries when I added a simple contact form to the
bottom of every single page of the e-commerce store I've been building. We
went from about 2-3 online enquiries per week to 2-3 per day.

I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard
great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my
site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own
arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission
with my own code.

~~~
SwellJoe
_Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form
code to submit to their servers)._

I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about
slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using
locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking
(and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually
looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that
conversation.

~~~
h34t
If you can find it, do let me know. I was just working on this a couple days
ago and looked into it extensively.

The only option they offer which doesn't involve an iframe comes with a
warning, "It will NOT submit to our servers. Because of limited resources, we
cannot provide any support for helping you connect these files to your
backend." (I'd post the URL but it's in a logged-in area of the site).

~~~
veeneck
If you actually need to change the markup on the form, then your only option
would be to use our API to submit the data to our servers. Joe is correct in
that we do have embedded methods that reduce the load on our server and allow
you to handle the initial page load, but we do not have a method that allows
you to use your own HTML (but you can use your own CSS). Posting to our
servers DOES work, but if there are errors on submission they would be shown
to the user on the hosted version of your form.

~~~
h34t
OK. I didn't see any mention of the API in the 'Code Manager' section and
didn't think to search specifically for it.

In any case, it looks like it's best if I stick with what I've got if I want
to maintain error display... I have functionality in the form that's not
possible to add with CSS, I'm using jQuery to set up ajax form submission /
error display, and XPertMailer sends my messages through a gmail account on
the back end.

Thanks for the info though.

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rksprst
I'm surprised anyone submits an RFP with a from that long. I prefer a simple
name, email, and message field instead.

