A smoke-filled battle rages. A noble-looking green imp, wielding a sword, slashes at bloated CSS imports.
WE HEAR a chorus of frameworks wailing, “but we liked that page.”
SUBTITLE FADES IN: THE PRODUCERS WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT THEY REGRET FUNDING THIS MOTION PICTURE...
NOBLE LOOKING IMP (melodramatic): There’s no reason a contact form plugin should call more dependencies than Doom. I am Formimp - and I bring you... FREEDOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
In truth, Formimp’s story is less epic. One day, Greg Hluska was searching for six- or seven-letter .com domains using a bulk checker. He found siteimp, then registered formimp. When you're used to branding a product with a name like fulhjqa.com, a formimp is a narrative gift.
Siteimp started as a home for performance testing tools, but Greg soon found that some contact forms were major performance hogs. They loaded tons of global dependencies, hurting speed and privacy. He began recommending forms that didn’t require back-end integration - and were fully native to the site.
Greg’s frugality (his resume says determination, others say stubbornness) kept him from paying too much for "just routing three form inputs". He dove into DIY mode - again - and started writing code. The first version was in Python, integrated with Microsoft Teams.
Whoopsie
If you have read the genesis story of other Greg Hluska projects, you likely see a trend. Fueled by a potent cocktail of self-belief and naivetes, he takes DIY a little too seriously and often jumps before thinking. It turns out that there is a whole lot more to this than 'just routing three form inputs.' Spam is an issue.
SPOILER ALERT: spam is a really big issue.
As Formimp started to spread amongst his clients, Greg discovered that there was a heck of a lot more to this whole thing than 'just routing form inputs'.
But another weird thing happened. #Contact channels were turning into a hangout for marketing, technical staff, product managers and project managers. Entire JIRA epics started in #contact.
Four years later
The technology and business models have both changed a dozen times. It's an SDK now with no plans for broad release. Now it only supports Slack because it's designed to serve bootstrapped founders who may only be able to afford free. Greg has an Electron based project on the go and plans to implement Formimp as the in app tech support because he really likes knowing that a privacy first fitness tracker has a privacy first contact solution built in. Or that DIY thing is happening again.
Greg still takes DIY too seriously and leaps before he looks, though now he has a mildly traumatized generative AI assistant that helps him plan, document and think through things. And design stuff.
After all this time, you would think that he's learned to write an about page or a bio without descending into farce and parody, but no. In retrospect, this likely became inevitable when he got obsessed with Mel Brooks after Spaceballs was released.
And that brings the story to today where it's still waiting to be written. But the product was born of stubbornness, spam and a lot of joy. With neither spam nor stubbornness in short supply, the future will be even more joyful.