Momentum Episode 31:
How We Launched Jotform AI Agents from a Marketing Perspective

What does it take to bring a product like Jot Form AI agents to market? With a product that has so many possible use cases, how do you narrow your focus from a marketing standpoint? Today, we'll peel back the curtain as we chat with Jot Form's VP of marketing and former host of this show, Elliot Spreer, to find out the ins and outs of what it took to launch our most ambitious product yet. Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jot Form where we talk about the technology, productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. Let's get started.

3 2 1. We have a liftoff.

Maintaining momentum.

All right, welcome to the show, Elliot.

Thank you. It's weird to be on this side of it.

Yeah, I was going to say, elephant in the room. You're no longer going to be hosting the show since you're a very busy man, passing the baton, but we'll miss having you as host.

Hopefully I can fill your very big shoes and keep the momentum going.

Oh, that's a good one. Did you write that one out in advance?

I did. I'm sorry.

Podcast is in good hands. You will do great.

I didn't just bring you on to make dumb jokes, I promise.

I mean, I'll be here for it.

What I'm really curious to hear is about the launch of AI agents that we had back in February. I would love to get your perspective as VP of marketing on how that whole launch went, what the challenges were behind the scenes, and all of the nitty-gritty ins and outs that only you really know. I feel like we're kind of in the dark about that stuff.

First of all, we should probably explain what AI agents are.

Yeah, for sure. The term AI agents has become more commonplace vernacular in the last year or two. Salesforce bringing AI agents to market played a role in that. Back in 2023, AI agents was still a term most people weren't familiar with, but now they have become more common. Essentially, an AI agent, especially our AI agent, can be thought of as a digital assistant that works on your behalf around the clock to help with a number of things. For the most part, it's customer support, engaging and talking to customers. They can fill intake forms, automate actions, trigger specific actions on your behalf, and basically streamline both the user experience and the administrative experience. They help create workflows and enact certain triggers and actions faster. They don't replace but augment your existing workforce so you can do more with less.

So kind of helping people fill in the spaces they might have in their organization. I know we talked to a user recently who was kind of a one-man show and had three agents going that handled different parts of the administrative stuff. You can think of them as different versions of you who are there to help support, provide customer support and service, and streamline things. It effectively enhances your company's scope and the hands you have managing various touch points with customers.

Yeah, very cool. Do you remember when you first heard that we were developing our own AI system on the back end?

Yeah, it was last year at some point. I don't remember the exact date. We were being very strategic with our entry point into AI. Many companies rush to market to capitalize on the AI boom, but Jot Form didn't do that, which I think was the correct decision. We took a more deliberate approach. I anticipated our first go-to-market experience with AI would be a traditional form co-pilot where you type in chat what you want a form to look like and it creates it. But last year we learned we'd be implementing a much more ambitious and broader AI tool, these AI agents. It went through different stages of formation and evolution until we figured out exactly what it was and its full scope. It turned out to be much more ambitious than anticipated. It was exciting but definitely a challenge.

Yeah, and we still have a form co-pilot AI thing incorporated. Our first true AI product officially announced and rolled out was the AI agents, and we went with a go big or go home strategy, which I think paid off.

Do you remember your initial thoughts when it was tossed your way, especially from a marketing standpoint?

Yeah, I thought this was going to be a lot. It was much more ambitious than I anticipated. My first question was what aspect of this do we market because AI agent is a broad term and can do a lot of things, especially our product as it was evolving. I started thinking about our positioning and differentiator. It took a while to articulate and find that. I appreciate that we didn't rush the launch or announcement. We took our time, had a lot of beta testing, and the product was in circulation for months before coming to market. That was pivotal in helping us figure out positioning, marketing, go-to-market, demand generation strategy, and everything else.

I know the first time I heard about it was during a hack week, usually done on the development side, but we did it from a marketing perspective, which I thought was very cool. Do you remember the initial thought for doing that exercise?

Hack weeks are somewhat of a prized tradition at Jot Form. The entire department focuses on one problem for a week, trying to solve it creatively. From those hack weeks, you get some pretty cool ideas. The idea for AI agents came from a developer hack week earlier in the year. That idea struck gold, and leadership decided to bring it to market. We also do hack weeks on the marketing team, usually when we have a big launch coming up. It's important to approach it from a full team perspective because AI agents have a broad scope with many possible stakeholders. It was beneficial to take a week as an entire team to wrap our heads around what AI agents are and how they speak to our users. This was early in the process, around last August, months before the product came out. The product changed after that hack week, but it provided the backbone for much of our go-to-market material. For example, the launch ad you spearheaded was almost verbatim the type of ad you pitched and we went to market with.

I remember it being a shoot for the moon type of idea and never thought I would be asked to make it.

But lo and behold, when you pitch a good idea, it's really cool to see the team come together and get excited because it is an exciting product. If we had just gone to market with a form co-pilot type tool, it would have been fine, but this had momentum behind it. It felt big, different, new, and like a challenge that needed to be met. There was a lot of excitement internally building up to that.

Yeah, it was the first moment I realized this is going to be big and could definitely benefit smaller entrepreneurs and solopreneurs by helping them do more with less. AI can be a scary topic to some, but this can really benefit small companies trying to scale.

It really helps companies scale because good customer service is essential but resource-intensive. We use AI agents for our own customer service as a frontline defense to handle simple requests, triage, and route requests appropriately. AI agents help smaller companies maintain that touch point with customers so solopreneurs and small teams can focus on developing and scaling instead of responding to every request. Many requests are basic questions that users could answer themselves with a help guide, but AI agents handle those. More complicated issues go to developers. This helps solopreneurs get a buffer to focus on scaling their company.

AI agents are there 24/7 to help with questions and answer simple ones instantly, whereas people might have to wait until morning for bigger issues. Support hours are limited, but forms are always available. With this product, forms can answer questions for users, trained accordingly with all the information they need. That evolved into the AI agent product we see today.

Can you walk us through what this launch looked like behind the scenes from your perspective? You were spinning all the plates, working with teams, developers, and senior management.

Sure. It was very collaborative, more so than any launch I've been part of at Jot Form. The majority of our workforce was working on AI agents leading up to launch on a scale and scope I had never seen before. It was cool to have that sense of unification. Our demo days had everyone focusing on AI agents. We took our time with a long runway, which was critical for a fully fleshed out and leveraged launch. We did not rush to put out a minimum viable product. We waited, had beta users, and feedback. By launch time, we had months of work and a plan. It involved many meetings, collaboration, trusting stakeholders who knew their stuff better than I did, and managing it all to bring it to fruition on launch day.

I remember every time I checked in, it got better, especially toward launch. The process behind the scenes was incredible to see the product's growth. From my perspective, with no coding knowledge, it improved leaps and bounds each time. I've been at Jot Form for eight years, and this is definitely the biggest launch I've been part of. The mobile forms app was big, but this one takes the cake.

This launch had the potential to be transformative for every single Jot Form user, which is realistic to say. Every user could have a viable case to use and leverage AI agents extensively. It covers many industries, use cases, and audience segments. Doing the work behind the scenes to prepare for every possible contingency was more important than any other launch I've been part of.

What were the biggest challenges leading up to the launch?

Figuring out what it was and what to focus on because AI agents have a broad scope and do so much. We had to limit that scope to cut through clutter, differentiate, and highlight what to emphasize. Early on, we didn't know it would be strictly customer-focused. AI agents do a lot, and we launched with the tagline 'the future of customer service,' which was the right direction, but we only knew that a few months beforehand due to extensive beta testing. I struggled with whether enough people would know what an AI agent is and grasp the product. Some launches are simple to understand, but this was new. It was about honing in and succinctly communicating the core value proposition. After that, the primary consideration was aligning all deliverables and messaging across many teams and stakeholders. It took a lot of collaboration and meetings to unify and align. Everything worked out great, but it was a different process at a different scale. We also had one of our first live launch events, which required new logistics and production challenges. It was important to celebrate the launch with users on the day it launched. It took a lot of coordination but had a lot of impact with amazing engagement.

You were heavily involved.

Yeah, it ended up being a really fun project. I'm proud of how it all came together with cross collaboration between the San Francisco team and the team in Turkey. It really came together nicely. I'm curious how long it was open to beta testing and how you arrived at focusing on customer service from being in the weeds not knowing where marketing would go.

ID made that call, and it was absolutely correct. We opened beta testing months before market launch. By launch, we had over a thousand users and now tens of thousands. We collected feedback from beta users through a dedicated dashboard. Reflecting on use cases and feedback, about 90% of use cases ended up customer service-oriented. Our CEO identified this trend in Q4 last year and made the call to focus the launch on customer service. AI agents do many things, but customer service was the biggest trend across use cases. Our bet was to draw people in with the most common use case, customer service, and then users learn other capabilities. Focusing on customer service as the big differentiator was the right call, based on real data and users.

It's so cool that people take time to give feedback. We have a passionate user base.

We definitely do. Jot Formers love the product and guide what we make, develop, and prioritize. They absolutely guided the future of AI agents.

Backtracking on bringing it to market, naming and taglines are always a big hurdle. What was the process of arriving at Jot Form AI agents, the future of customer service?

Jot Form AI agents was the simplest answer and the right one. We called them AI agents in development because that's what they were. We considered different names but wanted people to grasp what an AI agent is. If released in 2023, we might have called it differently due to less familiarity. By 2025, AI agent was common enough. The tagline is a product marketing question that determines how we market and content. Once we knew the focus was customer service, coming up with the tagline was next. It was more a feel thing than data-driven. Our CEO had a vision for the tagline to evoke intent and feeling. We envisioned the product as future-proof, letting people and businesses focus on expanding and more immediate problems than basic customer service questions. The tagline needed to speak to the future and possibilities. We iterated and had a mini hack week for taglines. We ended up with 'Imagine the future of customer service,' which spoke to imagining a world where you can respond instantly to any customer anytime, anywhere. The simple answer tends to be the best. We went back and forth with options, but the tagline was in our prompt. Marketing can get complicated, but we retraced steps to the simple answer, which was in our prompt. We ended up in the right place after iteration.

That's a good lesson for marketers: sometimes you don't need to overcomplicate it, but it takes time to sort through things before the aha moment.

Since launching in February, it hasn't slowed down. We keep releasing new things to make AI agents more powerful. Can you talk about what has come out since launch and the thought process on what to tackle first and what's most important to add?

With no product, do we just release and stop focusing? We usually have teams dedicated post-launch to iterate, improve, and fix bugs. AI agents was a fully viable, well-fleshed product with many channels: voice, text, standalone, web, mobile. We had significant plans and consider AI agents the future of Jot Form. Internally, the first version was just the start. We have a tentative roadmap for AI agents. Priorities come from user feedback and requests. In May, we launched Shopify AI agents due to many e-commerce users integrating with Shopify. Integrating AI agents with Shopify was a clear next step. We have multiple iterations in the queue to bring to market soon. Work on AI agents will not stop. We have tens of thousands of users and relentlessly work to improve the product and meet user needs.

I saw a roadmap for the next four months. We are definitely not slowing down. Even if not launching a new AI agent product, there's backend work like integrating AI agents with Jot Form boards to make workflows smoother. The fun never stops.

I want to thank you for giving your insight and perspective. This is new to me as I work on the video team and am focused on video, but hearing it from your perspective spinning all those plates has been interesting. It's a huge operation with many moving parts and makes me appreciate the heavy lifting you do.

It is a team effort. I oversee a lot, but ultimately it's teamwork with many people putting in long hours to bring something to market we can be proud of. It was cool to see Jot Form internally rally behind this launch and externally see customers rally behind it. The reception has been amazing with tens of thousands of users growing every day. It's something we can be proud of.

It's been cool to see it implemented, especially users I've talked to. We do many video case studies. I was worried AI agents might feel dark, but talking to people using it for grade school projects or gauging how a child feels and responding or sending to a counselor is really cool. You never know how users will use it. Our users are creative and it's humbling to see.

Elliot, anything we've missed or nuggets of wisdom to leave us with?

Not much. Just give it a try and if you train your AI agent, train it well. You get out what you put in. We've seen success with users investing time training because the more you train your model, the better it gets. I encourage anyone interested to know that training is part of the process but you will reap rewards from investing time upfront.

Definitely a great sentiment to end on. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you to everyone for watching. We'll see you next time.

It was great being here. Thanks for having me.