How My Form Builder Made $33K This Year

August 16th, 2025

save

About
Business

Cameron Nuckols

Founder, Deformity

$2K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Deformity

deformity.ai

from Pleasant Grove

started May 2024

$2,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Cameron recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Deformity? Check out these stories:

Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi 👋 I’m Cameron. I founded Deformity because I knew that my beautiful wife wanted to be the breadwinner in our family. Can you imagine if I didn’t give her the chance?

Deformity is an AI-powered form builder that converts better than traditional forms. Take Typeform or Google Forms, marry it with AI, and you have Deformity. We serve a diverse range of customers, from small SaaS products to photographers and marketing agencies. We even have golf courses and hotels that use our forms for scheduling.

Deformity is the only form builder on the market that offers both static and AI forms. AI forms are like a conversational chatbot. They help companies gather better data by automating invaluable conversations with their customers.

Today we bring in enough to cover a quarter of my kids’ daycare costs ($500 MRR), so things are looking up! Deformity has generated approximately $33k in revenue this year.

My brother, Brennon, after I told him about Deformity

How do you come up with the idea for Deformity?

The idea for Deformity came in the shower. I recently sold a project that used AI to extract insights from surveys. The thought crossed my mind: what if I own the entire experience?

That is when it hit me like warm water after a cold plunge. Besides, I had to choose an idea boring enough that the Sam Parrs of the world would not touch it with a 10-foot pole. I did not realize it at the time, but I see new competitors launching almost every month. So the idea is likely not boring enough.

To validate the idea, I used a competitor’s product to collect waitlist signups. Some who signed up thought that the waitlist form was my actual product, even with my competitor’s logo. I collected around 50-100 signups on the waitlist, and Ben’s Bites featured my tool a few times. But the real validation I did was researching Typeform and the form market. I wanted to know that the market was big enough for a small fish like me to steal market share.

That was enough of a signal for me to begin building.

How did you launch Deformity and get initial traction?

Once I committed to building, I imagined launch day would be this big moment where my waitlist would flood in and growth would take off. In reality, it was a scrappy grind. I took longer to ship than I'd planned, and by the time the MVP was ready, the early list had gone cold. It felt like I was pushing a boulder up a cliff.

So I focused on momentum. I created a Deformity Reddit channel to help with SEO. I listed the product on Product Hunt and in AI directories (for the backlinks). I jumped into Reddit threads where people were looking for form solutions, DM’d users of competitors to offer a cheaper alternative, and sent cold emails until I received responses. And when someone asked for a feature or reported a bug, I’d often ship it the same day. That speed helped build trust, but it was still quiet.

The first paying customer finally came from someone who had filled out a Deformity form and decided to make their own. That's when I realized the product itself could be one of my most reliable growth engines.

What was the growth strategy for Deformity and how did you scale?

The first paying customer taught me that building this product was only the beginning. Getting traction in a crowded market like form builders is the real challenge. From day one, I faced users who expected Deformity to be polished and feature-rich. It took longer than I’d hoped to reach a point where people were genuinely happy with it.

Right now, most of our growth comes from three channels: cold outreach, Reddit, and some early SEO. I haven’t focused much on social media, newsletters, or partnerships yet, and while we do have an affiliate program, I haven’t put in the time to make it scale. One of our most consistent growth drivers is built into the product itself: free users share forms with a “Runs on Deformity” badge, and many new signups come from people who fill out a form and decide they want to make one of their own.

If I were starting over, I’d take a much narrower approach. Instead of launching into the broad, highly competitive form market, I’d choose a small, specific audience and use AI to solve one valuable task 100 times better than anyone else. That focus would make it easier to stand out, avoid going head-to-head with big software players, and carve out a category I could own from the beginning.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Deformity?

One lesson I’ve learned from building Deformity is the value of time and persistence.

Back when Deformity was at just $58 MRR, I got an offer to sell the business for $35,000. At that point, I’d been building for months, but the product was nowhere near what it is today. I thought about taking the money, but ultimately decided to keep going. What else would I do? Build another SaaS?

This year alone, Deformity has generated about the same amount in revenue as that offer. And that’s during a year I wouldn’t even consider to be super great. Seeing that happen reinforced something important for me: you don’t have to hit a home run right away for a project to be worth building.

The truth is, a lot of founders launch, push for a week or two, and then move on when things don’t blow up right away. I’ve learned that sometimes the biggest differentiator between the ones who make it and the ones who don’t isn’t funding, or a perfect growth hack. It’s sometimes simply sticking with it long enough to get better.

Whether Deformity becomes a financial success or just a small, profitable business, the journey has shown me that continual improvement compounds. Keep building, keep improving, and the results have a way of catching up.

Discover Similar Business Ideas Like Deformity

	Idea	Revenue
Nomad List Build This	'Community platform for digital nomads worldwide'	$266K monthly
Betterpic Build This	AI-powered platform for professional headshots ... AI-powered platform for professional headshots from selfies.	$20K monthly
Aceternity UI Build This	Component library streamlining web developers' ... Component library streamlining web developers' landing page creation.	$80K monthly
Live Tourney Build This	Golf tournament management and live scoring SaaS.	$3K monthly
Style DNA Build This	AI-powered personal stylist for sustainable war... AI-powered personal stylist for sustainable wardrobe management.	$223K monthly
Mailbird, Inc. Build This	Email client unifying inboxes on Windows and Mac.	$170K monthly
Hugging Face Build This	Open-source AI platform for sharing ML models.	$4.2M monthly