How We Built Arengu — Story and Vision of Our Startup

Arengu was officially founded in May 2018, but we had to come a long way before finding our value as a company. Today, we'd like to share our road with you, so you can get inspired and learn from our story.

How we built our startup — From our initial idea to what we are today

Arengu is now a low-code SaaS meant to improve everyone's signups. With this tool, you can build any kind of signup form, but you can also build server-side logic to finish it off without code.

But in its origins, our startup was born as a form builder called RocketForms. In a market full of already consolidated form builders, we thought we could find a niche for us, just by doing it better! We now consider this our first fail as a startup. 

The market was full of consolidated businesses (such as Typeform, Jotform or Wuffo, among many others). As people asked what our differentiating factor was, we realized our competitors were offering great features, and our startup didn’t offer a competitive advantage in this market. This is where we executed our first iteration — one step closer to what Arengu is now.

Our first iterations

By this point, we decided to take RocketForms one step further and iterate it to a smart form builder. Instead of just builder forms, you could add data enrichment actions to improve the way you ask for your users’ data. By using external providers (such as Clearbit, FullContact, or LinkedIn) our users could get more data without specifically asking for it in their forms. This idea would lead to shorter forms with less fields, yet to richer submissions with more valuable data. 

This looked like a good idea, but in reality it was a good and late idea. By then, Clearbit announced they were launching Clearbit forms, an approach to forms with data enrichment. Of course, Clearbit started from an enormous database, which made things difficult for us. Now, this is what we remember as our second fail. 

Becoming Arengu — A path to be the brain of a signup form

Signup forms are everywhere and they look way simpler than they are. Behind a basic registration form, there is usually complex server-side logic, including verification processes, authentication systems or even after-submission tasks.

How about building all the necessary flows for a form, without coding skills? Building a signup form takes a lot of developing tasks. That’s why we decided that Arengu should be the brain behind your signup forms — a tool both for marketers and developers to build forms with personalized logic, without coding. 

Our latest iteration so far consisted of connecting our forms to third-party providers via API, so forms can be complemented and rounded off with other actions, such as verifying users’ email, sending OTPs, signing up users to a database, and so on and so forth. 

This development turned Arengu into a low-code builder that allows two-way flows, instead of one-way flows.

Thanks to this, you can now use Arengu to modify the form’s functioning according to your own personalized logic and to the responses coming from the server.

A look at the future

As for today, Arengu aims to be the brain behind every signup form. A tool both for marketers and developers, to help you escalate your signup processes. 

Forms’ presence in our day-a-day lives is undeniable and their functioning affects directly on conversion rates and revenue for zillions of businesses.

On the one hand, everyone wants users to complete their signups with as fewer clicks as possible, so the process is frictionless and improves the conversion rates. But on the other hand, a signup process that’s too smooth and fast may lead to unqualified users or even fraud. Finding a balance between these two approaches is key for every online business and personalizing the forms and the logic behind them is a powerful tool to get the perfect signup form for your business.

The truth is there is a long way for signup processes to get better, and Arengu’s mission is to serve as a tool for that purpose, regardless of your skills. That’s the differentiating factor now!

Interested in trying Arengu out or knowing more? Take a look at our launching page on Product Hunt or try Arengu for free!