Formplus had started life a few years earlier as a Lagos-built form and data collection tool, incubated out of the CcHub ecosystem, competing against SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Tally.
By the time I joined in April 2019 as the company’s first marketing hire, in a team of fewer than twelve people, it already had something most early-stage SaaS products don’t: real, heavy usage, with hundreds of thousands of people creating and sharing forms on the domain every month.
How do you make a small Nigerian SaaS company discoverable in a category dominated by much larger, better-funded competitors?
I owned the marketing function from the ground up, working across SEO, content, onboarding, paid acquisition, landing pages, CRO, analytics, and product marketing.
I designed and built the organic acquisition system around Formplus—from the content and SEO strategy to the landing-page and conversion infrastructure behind it.
Formplus had started life a few years earlier as a Lagos-built form and data collection tool, incubated out of the CcHub ecosystem, competing against SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Tally. By the time I joined in April 2019 as the company’s first marketing hire, in a team of fewer than twelve people, it already had something most early-stage SaaS products don’t: real, heavy usage, with hundreds of thousands of people creating and sharing forms on the domain every month. What it didn’t have was a marketing budget that could go toe to toe with SurveyMonkey, Typeform or the well-funded newcomers circling the same space. Paid acquisition in that niche was, and still is, punishingly expensive. If Formplus was going to grow, it had to earn its page views.
If I could rerun that period, there’s one decision I’d revisit: we built everything on a .us domain rather than a .com or another globally recognized extension. At the time it felt like a minor detail. In hindsight it may have been a ceiling, a stronger global domain could have given more leverage to expand into other languages and markets, and to keep pushing toward something closer to 10 million monthly pages within four years, rather than plateauing where we did.
I left Formplus a little over two years after joining. For a while the growth continued, largely riding the momentum of what we’d already built. Over time, changes in hiring, product direction and the discipline needed to maintain that work eroded the advantage the site had spent those years earning. Looking at the traffic charts today, the decline is visible, and honestly, it still stings a little, this was one of my first real wins in SEO. Part of me still wonders whether staying longer would have protected it. That said, the core lesson holds regardless of what came after: disciplined, unglamorous SEO work, technical fixes, consistent content, smart templating, can out-compete far larger marketing budgets. It’s the same playbook carried into every project since.
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