Reform.app

Peter Suhm had spent three years building Branch, a continuous integration and deployment tool for WordPress developers. Despite all the right signals—partnership interest from major hosting companies, VC funding, acquisition inquiries—the product never gained real traction. Customers loved the idea but wouldn't use it. The core problem: WordPress developers weren't burning to solve deployment in a better way. They already had working solutions, and changing behavior was too expensive for a $50/month tool that required a $2,000 sales process.

By mid-2020, exhausted, living in a Copenhagen studio with his newborn son, and conducting customer interviews while his wife breastfed in the background, Peter faced a reckoning. He called his investors from Tinyseed and the large VC firm backing Branch—his voice shaking—and said he couldn't pay them back. Instead of demanding repayment, they gave him something more valuable: permission to move on. One investor told him, "I don't even care what you use it for. Just go have fun."

With runway remaining, Peter spent time at his cabin writing down criteria for his next business. He wanted something in a proven market, easy to sell, and where product quality could be a differentiator. An initial idea—an investor update tool using Typeform—quickly expanded when a friend suggested he just use Typeform itself. But while prototyping, Peter got frustrated with existing form builders. He joked to his mastermind (Derek Reimer of Savvy Cal and Matt Wensing) that "maybe it's time for a new form builder." They responded seriously.

Peter and his co-founder Bjorn (who had worked on Branch as a contractor) spent two weeks obsessing over a landing page. Peter used April Dunford's positioning book and iterated copy with 30+ people. He showed it to one or two people, got feedback, revised, and repeated. The landing page was built in Figma with a prototype form running on Netlify's form API—intentionally limiting scope to focus on messaging and design.

When they posted the landing page on Twitter, it got 100,000 views and 500 early access signups on day one. By launch, they had 1,300 people on the list. Four people asked to PayPal them money immediately. Andrew Warner from Mixergy prepaid.

With momentum, Peter and Bjorn decided to build. They'd spent a month perfecting the landing page and messaging; now they needed a real product. Their first strategy was dogfooding—rebuilding their own early access form in the new form builder. This took about a month. Once they had something usable, they started slowly onboarding early access customers, roughly six weeks in.

Peter spent half his time talking to early signups, learning which features they needed most. Some didn't need many—they were happy to try something new. Others needed more before switching. The key difference from Branch: people could try Reform in minutes. No boss to convince. No sales call. No expensive implementation. Just pick a template, get a URL, publish a form.

The contrast with Branch was stark. Bjorn said: "It feels like it's a lot easier to get a customer for Reform than it was for Branch. And it feels easier to get two customers and three customers too." The self-serve, low-friction model meant that even in the early days, conversion happened naturally.

Peter attributes much of this to positioning. Reform's homepage doesn't just say "we're a form builder." It says: faster, brandable, linear and nonlinear flows. It addresses the actual frustrations people have with competitors. And because Peter and Bjorn had tested messaging with dozens of people before building, they knew the words would land.

The product wasn't perfect—they're still catching up on baseline features. But they had enough that startups could use it for everything: product-market fit surveys, SaaS onboarding, early access lists. And importantly, they could dogfood it themselves, which meant the product improved based on real use.

Fortyfive days after launch, Reform had more than 60 paying customers and growing. The business model was simple: $20/month subscriptions. The contrast with Branch was night and day—no $2,000 sales process, no months of convincing. Just a 20-dollar decision and instant value.

Peter is now focused on the next phase: scaling awareness while continuing to build. He knows a great product alone won't get to millions in ARR. But with product-market fit validated, a proven acquisition model, and the ability to market through the same communities that backed Tinyseed and Savvy Cal, Reform has the pieces in place. The biggest risk from Branch wasn't the product—it was building something nobody wanted. This time, people are lining up.