Show HN: I made a form builder that saves data in Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a form builder that saves data in Google Sheets

sheetmonkey.io

142 pointsa_band50 comments

That is what Google Forms does, but it looks like you've added the benefit of more custom styling which Google Forms is not very flexible about.

I run my blog's subscription system off of Google Forms -> Google Sheets. It's free and very simple but I definitely don't like how ugly Google Forms is.

You got it 100%. Google Forms is great until you have to integrate it with a website. This is meant to work just like Google Forms but with the ability to be embedded right into any layout.

Nice, I liked the blog post you've got too [0]. I forgot my other gripe with Google Forms is that there's probably lost conversions to subscribers because it leaves my own site.

I keep meaning to follow one of these guides to embedding a form and posting to Google Sheets but the Google Sheets API is confusing and everyone's guide for doing this has a different method.

I just need to spend the time on it...

[0] https://sheetmonkey.io/articles/how-to-submit-a-html-form-to...

Thanks! Glad you found that post helpful. Yeah, the Google APIs are very powerful but not user-friendly at all for developers looking for a quick way to save data into a sheet.

Each year for my nephew's birthday, I set up a web page with a guestbook for people we know to leave messages for him. I'm "tripod.com guestbook CGI scripts" years old.

Each year I intend to write a tiny script that accepts form data and stores it in a Google Sheet, and deploy it to AWS Lambda. Maybe I'll finally do it this year? Or maybe I'll use your service ;)

That's awesome. What a cool idea. :-)

Consider using Google Forms?

https://www.google.com/forms/about

Neat project. Are you worried that SurveyMonkey will attack you for having a similar name to their trademark?

Yikes. Hadn't considered that. Hopefully not.

I'd change the name now while it's still early, so people won't have to go hunting for the new name later.

If it's any consolation I did not have this thought.

Really unfortunate, love the artwork!

This is the last thing you should be worried about

Change it to Sheetdonkey. Donkeys are cool and you only have to change one letter everywhere.

Yeh but then the brilliant "infinite monkeys" doesn't work on the pricing page [https://sheetmonkey.io/pricing.html].

I mean, maybe infinite donkeys would do excellent Shakespeare too...

As someone who had to research this recently, but is not a lawyer (so take this with a grain of salt): I would find it highly unlikely that a legal challenge arises over this. You are not doing anything on your site to mislead customers or cause confusion with surveymonkey, you clearly did not act in bad faith, it would be impossible to collect evidence that actual customer confusion occurred, and it is reasonable to think that customers looking to send surveys online are sophisticated enough to determine the products apart.

The only possible trademark issue I can think of (I can't remember the exact case here, but it had to do with Polaroid) - a trademark holder can claim they intend to expand their operations to use the name, so SurveyMonkey could theoretically say they plan on expanding to [xyz]monkey without any obligation to actually do it.

They didn’t go after Mailchimp. A good sign.

This was my first thought as well

Same here.

Is SurveyMonkey rebranding to Momentive or is that just a parent company name?

Although I'm not in the target audience (because Google), I think some of my less nerdy friends would find this extremely useful. I've had quite a few ask me for an easy way to create a quick form to gather responses when organising an event or to run a little survey. Thanks for creating it, bookmarked. Will recommend.

Thank you! Hope they find it useful. :-)

I've been asked to maintain the contact info for a non profit club. Something like this is almost what I need, but I would also need to be able to edit existing entries as well as to run some simple queries (who has not paid their dues?). Does any such cloud based open source software exist? CRM systems are overkill, and there are some downloadable tools, but nothing cloud based AFAIK.

You could probably construct a decent Asana workflow around this using forms, custom fields, and automation rules, but it's not free.

With enough courage and either a lot of formulas or a bit of scripting, you can do simple queries just fine in Google Sheets.

Yeah, I actually do something similar with some of my projects. I'm able to get good results directly querying sheets: https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/google-sheets-query...

Pivot tables have a bit of a learning curve but you can also use them to dynamically pull data out of sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en&co=GENI...

Maybe give Airtable a go. I’d think something with an interface would be better than embedded

CiviCRM is made for nonprofits. It can be overkill for simple requirements, but you can turn off most of the clutter. There is a low-cost SaaS hosting for $10/month (https://civicrm.org/spark). Full disclosure: I am a dev & hosting provider.

Perhaps appsmith.com or budibase.com is what you're looking for

Here's a cloud based CRM that might fit the bill. Not open source but certainly doesn't cost the earth.

beaconcrm.org

You should give DronaHQ a spin for this. I have used it to build a simple frontend app, connect my sales lead maintained on a google sheet and streamline some activities (assigning leads, edit information,send email, track payment/subscription) They offer ready connectors so you can plug it to your data source of choice. I am pretty satisfied with the tool (https://www.dronahq.com)

I would go with Budibase - it's free, has multi-step forms, you can use an external db, or use Budibase's built-in database. You can also automate notifications when a new contact is added.

This is great. Two questions:

1. Could I have “code” in subsequent sheets to manipulate data coming in through the form and output results.

2. Could you embed questions in an android app? If you could I would immediately have a lot of use for this.

Thanks and well done!

Thanks!

1. I'm not sure I 100% understand what you're asking here but it seems that what you're looking for is very possible by triggering workflows off of sheets. https://solutions.appsheet.com/workspace or https://zapier.com are a couple of great ways to do this.

2. If you can embed HTML in an Android then you should be able to embed one of the forms. I haven't done it before. Let me know if you try it and how it goes.

This is great. I use Google Forms a lot and love the tight seamless integration with Google Sheets, but hate the styling when embedded. This solves that problem well.

But the way you described it in the HN post header almost threw me off, made me think - "Isn't that Google Forms already? Why reinvent the wheel?" I wonder if targeting the painpoint of styling the embedded form would be a better proposition.

So instead of "A form builder that saves data in Google Sheets", what if it was something along the lines of "Custom styling for your ugly Google Forms."

I wonder what this enthusiasm to throw data at google should be good for.

I made a commandline binary https://mro.name/form2xhtml that turns server side form dumps back into html for ease of processing.

Put that into your tool pipeline (offline processing is fine) and be good. No 3rd parties involved.

Neat! Quick question—your pricing says "3 forms • 100 submissions" — Is that 100 submissions a month, or once you cross a 100 you have to sign up for the subscription?

I have a use for this, so I think I will sign up regardless.

That's 100 submissions a month. Thanks for giving it a shot!

It looks great, and very professional. I'm impressed.

Did you build it yourself? Because it honestly looks like a full blown company had built it by how good it looks from the outside. If so, you're a f**g machine!! Congrats.

Thanks so much, midrus! I did build it myself. Super kind to hear.

Great project! The artwork makes it look very friendly. Did you have any issues with Google API quotas?

Thanks! In regards to API quotas, the rate limiting happens on a per-user basis so we manage to stay away from the limits for most users. That being said, I did build the system with a retry mechanism with delays so in case something does hit a limit, it shouldn't be lost.

Videos on your homepage don’t work on iPhone, show black screen

Ah dang. Thanks for the heads up. I'll take a look.

EDIT: I was missing the `playsinline` attribute. Fixed now.

Fix working indeed

It'd be cool if this could work with Airtable, too.

Good suggestion. Thanks!

Love how you load the page with the logo first

Thanks! :-)

Why not just use Google form or other form builder?

What is the benefit to use 2 tools instead of 1 to do the same thing?

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