Home / Founders / Farokh Shahabi
Shahabi turned a free internal data-collection side project into Formaloo after watching small companies collect piles of data they could not turn into decisions without hiring a specialist team.
Farokh Shahabi is co-founder and chief executive of Formaloo, a no-code platform for forms, databases and internal apps that helps teams collect and analyze business data without writing code. He is a serial founder who started companies in Iran and the United Kingdom before Formaloo.
Growing Up in Shiraz, Iran
He grew up in Shiraz, Iran, then moved to Tehran to study and start his first companies, as he told in a Formaloo origin interview. Early ventures included service and development firms, then a web-based social network in the region that grew large before smartphones took over. Without capital to rebuild for mobile, the team licensed its data-mining engine and exited.
Winning Awards with Eventbox
His next startup, Eventbox, was an event-management SaaS for conferences and exhibitions that used data mining to grow. In 2016 it won a prize from UFI, the global exhibition industry association, for analytics work in that market. A larger events firm later bought and merged with Eventbox. He has also cited Hostinstall, a UK data and web provider, and Bipfa, a microblogging platform in the Middle East and North Africa, among earlier companies in an Indie Hackers interview.
Turning a Free Side Project into Formaloo
Formaloo began as a free internal tool so clients could collect data in a standard way. Users did unexpected things with it and asked to pay for more features, so the team launched it as a business and later added analytics aimed at small and midsize companies that could not hire data scientists. Shahabi has said they bootstrapped at first and insisted on being cash-flow positive.
Learning That Perfect Products Arrive Too Late
One lesson he repeats from earlier ventures is that waiting for a perfect product costs customers. He described spending six months on a feature competitors skipped, only to watch those competitors win users by shipping sooner. At Formaloo he pushes the team to ship early, take blunt feedback, and keep the product simple enough that non-technical teams can run their own analysis.
