Interview with the founders of 123FormBuilder. Part one: Florin Cornianu, CEO

Around this time, 8 years ago, Florin Cornianu and Tudor Bastea left their safe jobs to follow their passion and focus on personal projects. They needed a tool to quickly and easily generate online forms for their projects, so they came up with a solution and in 2008 they founded 123FormBuilder.

Today, 123FormBuilder is a successful and thriving business that helps everybody create web forms and surveys for any webpage as easy as 1-2-3. So isn’t this the perfect time to conduct an interview with Florin Cornianu, CEO of 123FormBuilder and Tudor Bastea, CTO of 123FormBuilder? We wanted to ask them a few questions and pick their brains, to find out what they did to get to where they are today. Stay tuned if you want to know more about how they became successful by choosing to live without a safety net and had the courage to follow their passion.

Part one is the interview with Florin Cornianu, CEO . Enjoy!

What motivated you to start this journey with Tudor Bastea?

Tudor and myself had a good synergy from the beginning. He looked like a person I could negotiate with when our opinions would differ. On top of that, we had strong development skills along with a passion for research.

How did you get your idea for the business?

We needed a tool to quickly generate online forms for our other projects. Nothing fancy, just something to spend less time building forms.

What made you choose this type of business?

We looked around and at that time, a subscription model was considered an interesting approach to collecting revenue.

What is unique about 123FormBuilder?

We got a very strong pack of features that address any needs a business might have. From a simple contact form, to event registration forms or complex order forms, you can build  them using our product. However, our approach to integrations and partnerships is quite unique. None of our competitors are available on so many platforms.

What problem are you solving?

SMBs and Enterprise companies have various data collection needs. With 123FormBuilder they can address them all, no matter their complexity.

What is a typical workday like for you?

I leave my girls at kindergarten around 8, then I get to the office. I check my emails, check reports, and at 10 I do a tour of the office to say hello to everybody. Next, I jump to various scheduled or ad-hoc meetings with people from all over the company. I don’t have a specific department I focus on, however, I seem to be talking a lot lately with people from our Marketing team and the developers who build a couple of new high profile integrations. I usually try to leave at 18:30 in the evening so I can spend a few hours with my family. At home, I check my emails periodically, but I react only in case of an emergency.

What is the toughest decision you had to make in the first few years of 123FormBuilder?

One of the toughest decisions we made was to join forces with Adrian Gheara, our business angel. It was complicated because it meant to give up on the comfort and status quo. It ended up being a very good call.

To what do you attribute your success? 

To a decent amount of luck and to the inspiration to take advantage of it.

What is the best and the worst advice you’ve ever received ?

You can drink that shot of Tequila!

If you had one piece of advice for someone starting out, what would it be?

Measure everything and react based on data. It took me 7 years to realize that. Better later than never.

Don’t forget to follow our blog to read part two coming up, and see how Tudor Bastea, the CTO of 123FormBuilder, answered these questions.

Originally written by Claudia Borceanu