Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tanya Vucetic. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Tanya, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

The industry standard is that there are automated systems in place for everything in the sales cycle *except* filling out paperwork. Many tools advertise themselves as end-to-end however paperwork is still filled out outside of these tools by attaching multiple documents via email and instructing the recipient to fill out specified sections, skipping others. These lengthy forms ask for the same information over and over again. For example, how many times have you filled out the same information at your doctor’s office? Wouldn’t it be great if their new forms were pre-populated with your info so you don’t have to fill it out yet again? That’s where my company, BlockForms, comes in. We’re working hard to show people, there’s a different better way! We’re on a mission to eliminate manual data entry for good.

BlockForms is a *fill out all of your forms at the same time* web application – the heavy lifting before signature. Our technology automatically aggregates redundant questions using AI and smart mapping into one document for input which then seamlessly populates into all the selected forms.

Our biggest challenge as a startup is educating the market. Filling out paperwork is a tale as old as time that we’ve all endured and accepted as an effective way to communicate information. There are industries such as insurance, staffing, real estate and healthcare that have entire departments dedicated to filling out forms to process business. Our flagship customer has 97 forms in their library with an average of 100 inputs per form that we consolidate for them. Once businesses learn that they can fill out 97 forms (really as many forms as they’d like) with 1 master form, it’s a no brainer.

We like to joke, “I love processing paperwork!” said no one ever and “Do you have more forms I could fill out?” is not a question anyone would ever ask. All jokes aside, one use case we’re investigating after a social worker reached out to us is healthcare. This individual shared that she spends 60%+ of her time making sure her patients’ documents are in order rather than providing them care. Freeing up caregivers from administrative tasks so they can focus on their real job is hugely impactful and why this difference matters.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a Data Scientist Entrepreneur. What I mean by that is I do math with data to help businesses operate more efficiently. With data driven optimization being a passion of mine, solving the pain point of filling out forms was a challenge I naturally gravitated to. “There has to be a better way…” has been the motivation behind all my career growth spurts. I love figuring things out and I collect the skills needed along the way. I am a first-time entrepreneur and I’m doing something new-to-me constantly.

To geek out on the forms business for a moment, BlockForms tackles the sophisticated challenge of optimizing data input, given the wide array of language expressions and data types found in forms. For example, questions often appear above, below, or beside the input fields and could be in the form of fill-ins, dropdowns, or checkboxes. Terminology also varies widely—a simple example, “Business name,” “Company name,” and “Agency name” ask for the same information. Our technology smartly navigates these complexities to drastically reduce the need for manual data entry no matter how complex the form or unique the question. It’s a data harmony!

As exciting as this puzzle of forms and evolving as an entrepreneur is, my real passion is the belief that the core of technological advancement lies in human connectivity. This technology is meant to eliminate the task of filling out forms so we can focus on anything and everything else, doing human stuff, whether that’s providing care, closing more deals or spending more time with the people you love, we should be focusing on that – not data entry.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

There is a memo titled, “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” by Stewart Butterfield, sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013 that I routinely read. The part of the memo that I find to be pure gold is, “Sell the innovation, not the product. The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so. By that measure, Slack is a real and large innovation. It is not as eye-catching as self-driving cars or implantable chips — it is not basic research-y kind of stuff. But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity.”

This nugget of wisdom never fails to bring wind to my entrepreneur wings. Slack has successfully achieved innovation. When someone says, “Slack,” we know exactly what tool they’re talking about whether or not we are Slack users ourselves. Like Slack, we are not in a shiny sparkly wow vertical. In fact, analysts call our industry, Intelligent Document Processing. It doesn’t get more boring sounding than that. But for organizations that adopt BlockForms, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent because it will no longer be spent on forms.

I believe we all need examples to aspire to and while our journeys are unique and there are many ways to reach our goals, having someone or another organization to look up to helps chart a course of action. This memo from the early days of Slack does exactly that for me.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

What if told you that my co-founders and I have been building this business for multiple years and we still aren’t paying ourselves? Sounds crazy, but it’s true. Multiple years in and we’re only now going to market, selling our technology.

But how? Until early 2024, I maintained a full-time job while building my business on the side. I learned the very obvious lesson that giving your business what’s left of you after working full-time for someone else slows down building your business drastically. We bootstrapped getting to where we are with the resources available to us, our skills and time. This has taken a huge amount of patience, perseverance and unwavering belief in the business.

I am proud to say that my co-founders and I remain a united team. With our product poised for market launch, we are excited to announce that we’re initiating our first institutional funding round to fully realize our business’s potential.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://blockforms.co/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-vucetic/