Show HN: A website to build and host a form that writes to your Google Sheet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A website to build and host a form that writes to your Google Sheet

formtosheets.com

8 pointsbigdom10239 comments

I have in the past considered to try and build some sort of business on the google scripting apis (and always think what an awful idea, don't build stuff that makes you dependent on google!) but have found myself sort of always stymied by trying to figure out who my customers would be because I could never think of something that I personally really wanted that I would build with that tech.

So I am actually really interested in this - who do you see your customers as - why do people need to host forms that write to google sheets?

And if you do, why not just use Google Forms?

And yes, though Google Forms already exists, I think that having the form write directly to Google Sheets can be useful for some people who might want to do something with that data in their Google Sheet (create charts/graphs or calculate stuff with the data, etc.)

I also plan to add pre-defined layouts to the form builder which people can choose from and also more HTML/CSS (and potentially JS functionality) that people can integrate into their form without having to write code, which I don't believe is something Google Forms offers

Google Forms can put the data into a Sheet, where you can do all those other things.

You can host custom forms from Sheets with GScript. It's basically JavaScript and you can do a whole ton with it beyond just forms. You can even host websites from Sheets (as of 5+ years ago)

I found Google Forms pretty hard to style as I wanted. I’d be interested in alternatives but as a techie I’m too tight to pay for it when I can build it myself. But a marketer who is not technical might appreciate having branded forms.

Interesting take regarding the "don't build stuff that makes you dependent on Google" -- I definitely can resonate with that.

My motivation for building this was more so to capture a larger audience of people by integrating my website with software that so many people use, namely Google Sheets. And I see my audience to be non-technical who might want to build and host a quick form to collect emails or create surveys. They can do this without having to set anything up like a front-end or database.

Props for allowing to try out the UI without login. Seems like a nice small step up from Google Forms. Are you trying to turn this into something that makes money?

Definitely not closed off to turning this into something that makes money, but as of now this is more so just a fun side project I was interested in building and think that it could potentially be helpful for people -- especially as I add more and more features to it in the near future

Is the code open source?

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