Hey, there are a lot of websites that are hosted on services that don’t have a server-side language in which to process forms. I should do a startup that helps process forms there.

Good idea! It’s a clear need and offers a clear value proposition. Best of luck. You will have a little competition though:

• Arengu
• Basin
• FieldGoal
• FormBackend
• Formcake (nice CodePen demo, be like Formcake)
• Formcarry
• Formkeep
• Formspree
• Formstack
• FormSubmit
• form.taxi
• FormX
• Getform
• HeroTofu
• HeyForm
• Hyperforms
• Kwes
• Pageclip
• Paperform
• Smartforms
• Tally
• Web3Forms

And I bet there are several more at this point, I haven’t updated my list of these in a few years.

I came up in this industry working at companies solving “I need a form on my website”, Wufoo, then SurveyMonkey, which are still very much alive and kicking and great choices as well. Not to mention other heavyweights like Google Forms, Jotform, Typeform, etc, which all work fine on HTML-only sites, and vendor-specific solutions like Netlify Forms.

How would you break in? I wouldn’t try to compete on price. Too much competition for that, at prices that are already fairly low. I’d probably try to compete on marketing, in the deepest and widest sense of that term. Find a way to make people think about your product any time they think about forms. Advertising, Content Marketing, Developer Envagelism, Social Marketing, etc. It’ll be a hell of a hill to climb, but you can do it if you’ve got a decade to spare.

What worries me though, and what would make me not want to play the game at all, is that you’ve got competition that has built-in advantages over you by owning the platform. Netlify’s marketing for Netlify Forms is, just put a netlify attribute on the <form> and it’s done. They can make that work because they are the platform and they can do things in the build process that you’ll never be able to do. Be the platform might be the lesson there.