That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Miguel Arias on form handling and lowering the learning curve
Quick show notes Our Guest: Miguel Arias What he'd like for you to see: Kwes Forms His JAMstack Jams: Lowering the learning curve, Kwes, and AlpineJS His Musical Jams: Drake | Classical (and coding to rainfall) Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of That's My Jamstack, the podcast where we ask that simple Kwesion, what's your jam in the jam stack. I'm your host, Bryan Robinson. And this week we have Miguel arias on the show. Miguel is the co founder of Kwes forms. Hi, Miguel, thanks for being on the podcast with us today. Miguel Arias 0:42 Thank you for having me, man. It's a pleasure. Awesome. So Bryan Robinson 0:44 tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun, that sort of thing. Miguel Arias 0:49 Okay, a little bit about myself. I'm the co founder of Kwes forms, it's a, it's a form service ideal for like the Jamstack community. I like to think of us as like the next evolution of what form service should be. Before we were around, there were a lot of over called, like endpoint services, to kind of handle your, like your submission, storing and whatnot. And then we kind of felt like there was a big gap in the market where, you know, like, it kind of took care of that. But then you had to go on your own and figure out validation and components, like date pickers, multi step, things of that nature. So we kind of felt like it was a perfect opportunity to kind of get in there and that space and put out a product that that we would love to use, you know, and that we felt like maybe other people in that space would like to use as well. So what I do for fun, you know, COVID is kind of killed a lot of it, but when I, what I normally do for fun is play basketball. The weird thing about it, though, is that I actually like to practice more than actually play. Sure, I think it comes with like my perfectionistic nature, I just, I just have this thing that I like to train and just and my wife is the same exact way. So I'm glad that we found each other because we didn't go to the parks when it's empty. And just like practice all day. It's like the weirdest thing, but that's what we like to do. You know, Bryan Robinson 2:09 I can totally get that, like, as soon as you as soon as you introduce other humans into it, then like there's so many ways that like imperfections happen because of that. Some people find beauty in that and then it's like, but no, if you really want to, like compete against yourself, like doing it on your own just makes so much sense. Miguel Arias 2:26 Are you like sports guy, he like we like playing basketball? Bryan Robinson 2:30 I am I am not particularly athletic. I do have sports. Basketball is is up there. I am very when you introduce other human beings, I am very bad when it's just me shooting and like, you know, kind of running around. It's okay. Like I could I can play horse decently. But you get somebody in my face and I fall apart. Miguel Arias 2:50 Yeah, you know, I kind of find it like it's like therapeutic in a way just to kind of compete against yourself. It's cool. It's a good way to kind of exercise patience and stuff. I really like it. Bryan Robinson 3:00 Yeah, it's like, it's like, Alright, you know, you know, free throws, right. And like, it's really funny. My, my mother is actually a huge like NBA fan. And like when she's rooting for her team, she gets so frustrated at the players missing free throws. Miguel Arias 3:11 Yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:12 Don't you practice that enough? Like, can't you just make that shot? It's like, Well, yeah, except for when all the variants happen. And you know, you will miss every once in a while. But yeah, you get to kind of practice that. And you get to like, find your form. And I think there's a lot of a lot of cool things that happen in that space. Miguel Arias 3:30 For sure. Yeah. Cool. Bryan Robinson 3:31 So let's talk about the Jamstack a little bit. And I'm sure we'll kind of weave in some more about Kwes as we go forward. But like, what was your entry point into into the idea that Jamstack or static sites or whatever you want to call it? Miguel Arias 3:41 Yeah, the funny thing is when we started our service, um, we really just started it, because at the time, like, I met my co founder, because he was actually my boss. Yeah, when I was about, like, 18, I was looking to, to get a job so I can marry my girlfriend at the time. Well, I mean, she's my wife, now. She's my girlfriend at the time. She's my wife. And so we used to use a service called formstack. You know, which is great, but it was like, a, it's like a drag and drop type of service. And then one day, I just kind of burst into his office, as I normally would do. And I was like, bro, we should make our own like form service. You know what I mean? Like, not drag and drop something that I would like to use, just because it was a hassle to kind of go through that process and then have to like, put it on your site, you have to strip all this styling. It was just like, it was like an unneeded amount of work. Right. It's how I felt. Bryan Robinson 4:33 I use Formstack quite a bit at the agencies that I worked at. And yeah, it was, it was super handy for that for like the editors making the forms. It was super awful for like the developers working Miguel Arias 4:43 Exactly. So then we kind of felt like, you know, this really isn't the ideal tool for us, you know, so then I burst into his office and I told him, we should make our own thing and he kind of just like, looked at me like I was crazy. I was like, Yeah, he's like, go back to work. So then, so I was like, Alright, cool. I went home, I kind of just kept thinking about it, it's just in my nature, like, I get obsessed with things. So I kind of kept thinking about it. And then one day, I think maybe it was like, the next day, the next evening, I was in the shower. And then I just got this idea of how I would be able to go about it, you know, and I, like ran out of the shower naked, like, super wave naked. And I ran to like my notebook and start writing down and my wife was looking at me, like, I'm like a lunatic, you know? And, and so that's how we kind of started it. But I didn't really know what Jamstack was at the time. I never even heard of it. Yeah, the only reason, the reason that we got into it was because as it started gaining, like popularity, we started noticing a trend, like we started noticing people telling us, oh, this is perfect for my Jamstack site. And this is good for Jamstack, whatever. And I was like, What the heck is a Jamstack? You know, we looked it up and, and we felt like, you know, this is awesome, I kind of felt when I saw it, it made perfect sense. Like, that's where the industry at least, I feel like that's where the industry is probably headed because of how simplistic it is in nature. Like, I feel like the theory, or the concept of a Jamstack is to like, try to simplify, you know, your workflow as much as possible, you know what I mean? So I felt like, you know, it was a perfect entryway for our service, and I just kind of just fell in love with, with the whole concept of it in the community, which then allowed me to allow me and my partner to kind of improve the product now that we kind of knew what was really meant for right hand out, let's improve it even further. Bryan Robinson 6:37 Out of curiosity, what was kind of the, the beginning there? Like, what, where, where are you targeting the forms before that cuz like said, like, it is, like a great fit, like finding these services that you can fit into the Jamstack is just is so important. So like, Where was the methodology? Like, who are you targeting before you kind of had this discovery? Miguel Arias 6:54 Yeah, the methodology was really just, we wanted to build something cool, you know, something that we liked, and then we just put it out there. And it's funny, because you always hear in the SaaS community, well, not even just when you're building a product in general, that you're normally not supposed to work in secret for such a long time, before you put something out, you know, you want to do a proof of concept, put it out, see what people think. But then we totally you know, we were rookie, so we, we worked in silence for like three years. The product still not knowing what Jamstack was, or anything, you know, and then we launched it on product con. And then Ever since then, you know, we've we, that's when we started kind of getting the feedback, you know, but when we put it out there, it was really just, you know, for people doing WordPress sites, or just for anything, really, we were just, we were just targeting developers in general, you know, Bryan Robinson 7:45 I got to say, yeah, wherever developers were working and needed a form that was maybe outside of whatever stack they were using, or didn't want to bother with, they could just pick it up and put it put it in Miguel Arias 7:55 Right and make something fun, you know, it's like something that they would actually enjoy using, we felt like if a developer could enjoy using it, that was that was our guy, you know, Bryan Robinson 8:03 Out of curiosity, is there, is there any sort of in the actual, like infrastructure behind the product? Like, are you using kind of notions that you've kind of discovered in the Jamstack? In the back end? are we are we talking? Is it? Is it kind of its own monolithic structure? Or is that you know, microservices or serverless functions? What what's kind of going on there? Miguel Arias 8:22 Well, it's definitely its own thing. It's the script itself, because it's built on JavaScript, right? Because, you know, handles your front end validation, back end validation, you know, helps you build out these like complex things like multi step forms, repeater fields, things that normally kind of take up a lot of your time, that's like monotonous, it helps
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