Show HN: Create and collect forms directly from email

So, the purported benefits are that a) it's easier to create the form than other form creators and b) you'll get improved response rates because people fill out the form in-line and reply rather than clicking a link?

Marketing managers don't want to learn some type of special markdown, and I can't imagine they would ever prefer it to a nice WYSIWYG form creator like Wufoo or SurveyMonkey.

No one wants to try and figure out exactly where to click and put their "X" for each choice - that's a much more frustrating user experience than native form controls, even in a desktop browser. On a mobile device? Forget it, and don't forget that something like 30% of emails are opened and clicked on mobile devices.

Apparently Google Forms has a way of embedding native forms in emails, although I'm not sure how they do it:

http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2011/05/24/increase-survey...

Now that would actually improve response rates, and was what I was hoping to see here.

The trend appears to be starting out on .io and then when you get enough traction / money, buying the .com which would previously have been too expensive. I don't think many of the .io companies would consider their original domain a mistake.

Thanks for the comment!

HTML emails would be a next step to look at, and it would be great to be able to combine the advantage of fast/easy form creation without the need for any 'markdown' (just like most marketing managers probably also wouldn't type their blog posts in markdown, even though that might be more popular here). As we also have a different product which actually has a WYSIWYG form creator, this is just a nice way for us to experiment with different ways of creating forms, and see if there's ways to improve the workflow.

Inline html forms are another way of collecting the inline replies, but not every email client supports them (although gmail does), which means some people still have to click a link. It's definitely something worth exploring more though.

Looks really interesting, but I don't want to send all my emails through you.

I'd love to see something similar as a Python Library, though- It is unlikely to be competitive to your business, since the overlap between marketing guys who are going to pay you, and IT guys who would do it in Python are small ;)

I'd be happy to pay for a solution if you had one.