Gated: learning by listening with Typeform

Bombarded constantly by sales emails, Andy Mowat created a tool to keep unwanted emails out of his inbox. He quickly realized that this was a common complaint, so he founded Gated to bring his tool to others. Gated helps people take control of their digital attention so they can intentionally give focus to what matters to them.

As the business grew, Gated received overwhelmingly positive responses from customers. Mowat realized that he could harness the power of customer advocacy to drive growth. He also realized that Gated needed a way to nurture this advocacy in an efficient and organized way.

Typeform helped the Gated team save hundreds of hours, eliminate friction for their users, and unlock the full potential of customer testimonials.

Filtering in value

Front and center on their website, Gated explains what makes their product so valuable: "noise-canceling headphones for email." Immediately, people imagine the reasons they use noise-canceling headphones: to tune out screaming children on a bus or airplane, drown out noise at the office so they can focus on work, or simply create a few moments of peace and mindfulness during their busy lives.

On the surface, Gated's product is very straightforward: Gated keeps unwanted emails out of your inbox. Go deeper and you'll find that Gated is a lot less about just gatekeeping and a lot more about listening the right way, to the right things, at the right time, in order to bring the most value to people's lives. While it is definitely designed to keep unwanted emails out, the true motivation behind Gated is to let the right emails in. To make sure that everything in a person's inbox is worth their attention. Gated even challenges unknown senders to donate to charity to get through the filter, a novel idea that demonstrates humanity and creates genuine connection in what would otherwise be a non-personal interaction.

Ultimately, Gated is driven by recapturing the human connection that email was supposed to provide in the first place, and thereby reinfusing value back into people's lives. It's for this reason that a partnership with a company like Typeform has been so important.

Simple and seamless

"With Typeform, everything is easy," says CEO Andy Mowat. "The ease of implementation is completely seamless. We can mock something up, copy it, iterate on it quickly, pump it into Slack, integrate it with AirTable and our CRM…super easy. If we have an idea and want to try something new, we can get the data straight from our product, which allows us to personalize the customer survey and consolidate the fields because Typeform already pulls in the information. People only have to fill out what we need them to."

Typeform is a powerful tool for a company like Gated because the way the forms are built enables Gated to probe for customer feedback in a really simple and straightforward manner. It means something to Gated's customers that the form process reflects the same values that Gated embodies already: saving them time. Gated needs a digital form partner whose product is simple and seamless—both for Gated, as they're building the forms, and their customers when they're answering the questions. After all, what kind of sense would it make for a company like Gated to ask their customers to fill out forms that are cumbersome?

"We want to make the first experience as easy as possible," continues Mowat. "You can do it on your mobile. You can do it in seconds. How long should it take someone to fill these out? Certainly no more than three minutes. Plus the user experience design is amazing. We can skin the forms with our own brand on top of Typeform's beautiful form design, which elevates it for the user." Mowat and his team have been able to use Typeform to develop a testimonial machine to nurture customers and bring them to a place where they become even stronger advocates. By reimagining the process through a simple entry point, they've improved it dramatically.

The logic flow has been an important feature for Gated in keeping the form time low as well. "The logic flow is huge for us," reports Mowat. "It's well designed, and the ability to add our own logic flow questions into the form gives us a lot more flexibility in eliminating friction and creating a curated user experience."

At the end of the day, the biggest reason that Gated loves using Typeform is because they love to hear from their customers:

"Gated has become the firewall for my mental health." - Travis Boudreaux, CTO at Azra Games, supports Wounded Warrior Project

"Gated brings a sense of calm in the digitally polluted storm we all try to sift through." - Rea Ross, Brand and Community Marketing Speciality at BombBomb, supports Operation Underground Railroad

"It keeps all the clutter out of my inbox and I love that if people really want my attention, they can contribute to something great!" - Adam Burns, RevOps Manager at Timely, supports Wikimedia Foundation

"We used to get on the phone with people and ask them questions," explains Mowat. "Typeform allows us to do this in a scalable way, saving us hours each week by not being on the phone, while still giving us the valuable data from our customers. Someone's getting donations? Someone else's inbox is clean? That's great. We give them an opportunity, through the form, to post to social. We love to celebrate our user successes in social posts as well. We love to hear all of it. We're always looking for those moments of delight."

What's next

Gated is constantly looking for ways to integrate Typeform into their business growth activities, both for external clients and themselves. "We are a product growth company," Mowat emphasizes. "We're always iterating and testing, so we're really interested in using more Typeform products, like with video or tokenizing hidden fields that we send out with email questionnaires. That will allow us to move people in and out of typeforms that are most relevant to them without having to use a product trigger."