Formzapper hopes to replace paper for small businesses

When Andy Kallenbach started an IT support company in 2010, he was baffled by the amount of paper his clients were pushing just to operate their businesses. “One of my clients had two large rooms full of file cabinets filled with new employee paperwork,” Kallenbach said in an email interview. “With turnover of 1,600 …

When Andy Kallenbach started an IT support company in 2010, he was baffled by the amount of paper his clients were pushing just to operate their businesses.

“One of my clients had two large rooms full of file cabinets filled with new employee paperwork,” Kallenbach said in an email interview. “With turnover of 1,600 employees a year, the effort of mailing, filing and storing five years of forms became something of a full-time job.”

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Kallenbach (left) wanted to create a solution for small and medium-sized business that can’t afford existing services in the market, like FileBound or Perceptive, to simplify form management among employees.

So he started Formzapper, a Kansas City, Mo.-based company that launched its free trial system last month. The service allows individuals and businesses to sign up for a monthly subscription, create forms and securely send them to anyone online to fill out. Creating one form with five submissions is free, while two forms with 500 submissions is $15 per month. The monthly fee increases with the number of forms, users and submissions. 

Kallenbach said he plans to create brand advocates for the company from three major industries: Health care, staffing companies and education. Formzapper has already been involved with creating new employee forms for the staffing industry, and will soon start working with its first group of health care professionals creating new patient forms. The service is already used by one local school, and a few others are in the process of activating accounts.

Kallenbach said Formzapper has also created forms for background checks, time sheets, student enrollment and property inspections. 

Other features of the service include form approval management, custom filing for storage, electronic signatures and public forms that can be posted on a website.

Staffing companies and their employee forms are among Formzapper’s main targets. 

Kallenbach said working full-time on the startup is “imminent” for him and he plans to make it official in the next few weeks. Formzapper also currently employs a marketing intern, who Kallenbach said he plans to hire full-time for a marketing and sales position as soon as possible. Kallenbach still owns the IT support company, SaberCo, but has handed it off to existing employees to manage and run. 

For now, Kallenbach said he is bootstrapping the company, but will be looking for funding once Formzapper is ready to be scaled on a national level.

Kallenbach said paper is Formzapper’s most obvious competitor, but local competition of online form services is split between services like FileBound and web forms like Wufoo, Jotform and Formstack.

“They offer affordable online forms but lack the security, document signing and file management that businesses need to automate common paperwork,” he said.

Moving forward, Kallenbach said he is confident the free trial system, which allows for one form, one user and five submissions, will help get new users through the door.

For more on how Formzapper works, watch the short video below.


Credits: Top image from formzapper.com. Photo of Kallenbach from Formzapper’s blogScreenshot of Formzapper interface courtesy of Kallenbach. Quick Tour from FormZapper.com on Vimeo.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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