We make MyFormConnect. We're early, so we've been our own guinea pig: our forms, our leads, our spam. This is the honest version.
MyFormConnect Team
12 min read
We make MyFormConnect. We’re early, so we’ve been our own guinea pig: our forms, our leads, our spam. This is the honest version.
Let me start with the awkward bit: we don’t have many customers yet. That’s a big reason we’re writing this. When you can’t point at a crowd of happy users, the next most honest thing is to show how you use the product yourself, including the parts that went wrong.
For more than three years I worked at a company where the website used one tool, the operations team another, and the tech team a third. Whatever a customer had told us lived wherever it happened to land: somebody’s inbox, a WhatsApp thread, a notebook, someone’s memory.
When the person who knew the story was stuck in a meeting, whoever picked up the phone had two bad options. They could ask the customer to explain everything again, which is exhausting for someone who already did it once. Or they could fill the gap with a confident guess and hope it didn’t matter. People guessed more often than anyone liked to admit.
Nobody was lazy or dishonest. The information was just scattered, and no one could see all of it at once. The real cost of scattered information isn’t the time spent hunting for it. It’s the answers you give when you can’t find it.
Later the world changed. With Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable and Bolt, anyone can build a website in an afternoon, and plenty of people still run theirs on WordPress or Framer. Building the site became the easy part.
But every site still needs a back room: where enquiries land, who sees them, who replies, and what happens when a bot shows up. Big companies hire people for that. A solar installer or a two-person agency usually can’t. I wanted to build something that a technical person and a non-technical person could both use.
In tech, using your own product is called dogfooding. I never loved the word. I think of it as being Customer Zero: before we asked anyone to trust this with their leads, we trusted it with ours.
We started with the basics: a contact form, a little pop-up that says “leave your number and we’ll call you back,” and a support form where people can raise a ticket and attach screenshots.
That last one taught us something unglamorous. The moment people can attach files, somebody has to store them. On a typical site that means a storage bucket, a backup plugin, or a folder on a server nobody wants to think about. That’s server-admin territory, and small teams never signed up for it. So files stay right next to the submission they came with.
Then we needed the right people to hear about things:
We used to book calls with us through Calendly. Then we noticed that a booking is really just a form that creates a calendar invite, so we built that, with team working hours so nobody can book a call at midnight. Our careers page runs on the same thing, because a job application is only a form with a resume attached.
The part I’m proudest of is the least exciting: one timeline per person. If the same email turns up on a support ticket, a demo request and a booking, it’s one person with one history. Every activity on that lead (a form submission, a ticket, a booking, a note from a call) is tracked in the same place, across all your forms. After a call, type your notes or paste in the Zoom notes, and one click gives you a short summary and a suggested next step. Before any of it reaches the AI model, we swap personal details for placeholders. That’s a safeguard, and we’d rather you know exactly what it is than assume it’s magic. Most people look at this on their phones, so you can read the summary in a parking lot before walking into a call.
A few smaller things helped too:
As of the day we wrote this (4 November 2026), across our two accounts:
| Domains | 3 |
| Forms | 17 |
| Form responses | 6,866 |
| Leads | 192 |
These are our own forms. Read them as “what one small company’s real use looks like,” not as a customer count.
Spam found us within the first couple of days. Botnets seem to discover a new form the way ants find a picnic. It was the usual crowd: crypto, lotteries, marketing offers, SEO link pitches, shady links. Early on a lot of it got through, because the tricks kept changing.
Then came the morning I think about when someone asks whether the product works. Our own notifications started coming in. Ting. Ting. Ting. They came from our main demo-request form, and it took about five minutes to realise what was happening. Between roughly 10:02 and 10:07 UTC, 138 spam submissions landed in one burst and used up our limit.
My first move was to switch on Cloudflare’s bot protection for the site. Then we pushed our own fix: rate limiting. Did any real person try to book a demo in those minutes? We honestly can’t say. Once a limit is used up, you can’t see who got turned away. That sentence still bothers me, and it’s why I’m not calling the story neat.
Spam goes after your limits before it goes after your inbox. A flood doesn’t need to fool anyone. It only needs to arrive. That’s why we added rate limiting and blocking.
Not every form should have a CAPTCHA. We support reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare’s version and hCaptcha, optional per form. We use one on the forms where it counts, like our careers page, and not everywhere. Nobody has ever warmed to a company because it made them click traffic lights. Image puzzles have also become harder for people than for software. One ETH Zurich preprint reported a model solving reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges 100% of the time, against 68 to 71% in earlier work (TechRadar’s summary). That study covers one kind of challenge, so we don’t claim it applies to every CAPTCHA. And some real visitors now use an AI assistant to fill in a form for them, which a hard CAPTCHA turns away too.
Real people get flagged, and email addresses are part of the reason. Say two submissions arrive, from [email protected] and [email protected]. Can you tell which one is the spammer? Neither could we. The good email handles are all taken, so honest people end up with names that look machine-made. When a person marks a submission “not spam,” their judgement counts for more than our rules do.
We had a machine-learning engineer benchmark our filter on real production traffic, and it caught 99.2% of the spam. We’re not publishing the sample sizes, so treat that as our number, not a guarantee. Any filter can score 100% if it blocks everyone, so the number that matters more is how many real people it wrongly flags. That is never zero, and we’d rather say so.
Bots keep changing. Akamai’s botnet researcher says bots have adapted every time a new detection method was released (Akamai’s 2025 predictions). For one business, or a small agency, keeping up is a part-time job nobody wants. We’d rather do it once, in one place, for everyone. That’s the idea, anyway. We’re early, so for now it’s a promise more than a track record.
One note on where things happen. Our hidden honeypot questions, which only a bot would answer, are placed on your page automatically by a small script. The checking and blocking happen on our servers. The only thing your visitors ever see is the CAPTCHA, if you choose to turn one on.
A solar company already had a form on their Wix site. They started using ours anyway. They record their leads, and also what they learn on site visits and what customers ask for. We never designed it for that.
Our documentation isn’t friendly enough for people who don’t live in this world. If you build with AI every day, you’ll sail through. A business owner deserves a gentler path, and we haven’t built it yet. And spam is never finished. Bots get smarter, so staying ahead is a weekly chore, not a feature we shipped once.
If you want a drag-and-drop form builder, this isn’t it. We built it for people who create their forms with AI. And if your plan is to buy cold leads and have AI callers ring strangers, we’re not building for you. This is for businesses that want to look after the people who really reach out.
That’s the whole idea. On any given afternoon, anyone on your team should be able to open one place and know what’s going on with a customer, without asking twice and without guessing.
Numbers as of 4 November 2026.
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