Six years ago, I was at crossroads. Our product recommendation engine for eCommerce had hit a dead end. GDPR concerns made large retailers hesitant to work with vendors like us—they feared potential compliance violations could cost them millions in fines. But we had something valuable: product data collected from Amazon, which we used to train our recommendation algorithms. I wanted to test a new approach—selling this product data to eCommerce companies that wanted to build their own recommendation engine but didn't want to share customer data.
So, I quickly created a Google Form to collect leads. But when I embedded it on our website, it looked like a patchwork. I realized that privacy-conscious companies might hesitate to trust a business that couldn't even present a professional-looking form. To solve this, I decided to style Google Forms to match my website—essentially adding a CSS facade on top of Google Forms. That’s how Formfacade was born.
I launched it as an add-on in the Google Workspace Marketplace, thinking it would be a side project. But support requests started flooding in. It turned out thousands of companies had the same need—to collect leads via Google Forms, sync them to Google Sheets, and integrate them into their workflows. What started as a quick fix turned into a full-fledged product.


Using Google Forms as a CRM

Today, Formfacade has 2,000+ paying customers - many of them using it as a lightweight CRM for collecting leads, scheduling demos and getting customer feedback. Since we are also users of our own product, here’s how we use it internally as a CRM:
  1. Demo Scheduling: Prospective customers fill out a form to book a demo, and the data flows directly into our CRM system (built on Google Forms and Sheets).
  2. Support Requests: When users submit a bug or feature request, it’s automatically emailed to us and logged in our support forum. We also use an AI-powered auto-composer that suggests responses based on similar past questions.
  3. Subscription Management: When a user subscribes to a paid plan, we ask if they’d like to schedule a setup call. If they cancel, we collect feedback to understand why. Both use Google Forms as well.
Right now, we track 100,000+ leads in our CRM, built on top of Google Forms and Sheets. Even the blog you are reading and our company website are created using our site builder which runs on Google Docs and Forms.


Evolution of CRMs


A common question we get from those outside the Google Workspace ecosystem is whether Formfacade can compete with full-featured CRMs like Salesforce. The short answer: We don’t need to. Salesforce was considered incomplete compared to Siebel when it launched. So was HubSpot when compared to Salesforce.
  • Salesforce was built for sales teams tracking leads in spreadsheets but losing them when employees left. It moved sales tracking to the cloud.
  • HubSpot focused on inbound leads, capitalizing on the rise of freemium SaaS models.
  • Formfacade isn’t trying to be HubSpot or Salesforce. We’re focused on turning Google Forms into a lightweight CRM—one that meets SMBs where they already work: Google Workspace.
There’s a running joke in the industry that everyone ends up building a CRM. This happens because customer interactions keep evolving, requiring a new kind of CRM every few years. For example:
  • Siebel era: Customer interactions weren’t online, and neither were their records.
  • Salesforce era: Interactions were still offline, but records moved to the cloud.
  • HubSpot era: Both interactions and records went online as inbound leads became mainstream.
  • Formfacade: With Google Workspace so pervasive, businesses don’t need a full-fledged CRM like HubSpot.


Habit-Forming Leads to Silos

When elevators are running really well, people do not notice them. Our objective is to go unnoticed.
- Otis

One of our customers described how managing a single customer interaction required 10 different tabs, from email and calendar to HubSpot and payment software. We hear this repeatedly from our customers because, as builders, we aim to make our software an integral part of their workflow and turn it into a habit for retention. But this increases silos and complicates the workflow for customers. This complexity is precisely why Klarna recently moved away from Salesforce to a custom-built CRM, consolidating everything into one AI-powered system. 

With AI, we can now extract structured data from emails and conversations to build a CRM without manual intervention. Instead of requiring businesses to adopt an entirely new system, we can integrate seamlessly into their existing tools like Google Workspace. Today, every software is slapping a chatbot on top and calling it AI. But the true power of AI lies in extracting information from existing tools and making business software invisible. This approach may prove more effective than the latest fads (such as chatbots and agents) for startups looking to disrupt existing software across different business verticals. I hope these two lessons I learned in this journey:

  1. Something as small as adding CSS to Google Forms can lead to a viable product with traction.
  2. Piggybacking on existing tools like Google Forms can be less sticky but can attract customers who are tired of switching between silos.
can help you land on your own startup idea. All the best!