You're spending money to drive traffic to your landing page.

Then you ask people to fill out a form.

This is roughly equivalent to running a marathon to reach a door — and finding a sign that says "please assemble the door from a flat-pack before entering."

Most forms on most founder landing pages convert below 30%. Most discovery forms get abandoned at field four. Most contact forms get checked twice a year by the person who put them there.

The form is not the channel. The form is the friction.

What the form is actually doing

Three things, all of them bad.

One: it's a one-way wall. You wrote the questions. The visitor answers what you decided to ask. If their real concern isn't on your form, you'll never hear it. They leave. You don't know why.

Two: it demands work upfront. Twelve fields, dropdowns, a captcha, a sign-up wall, a confirmation email. Each step sheds another 10–20% of your visitors. By field eight, you've lost two-thirds of them.

Three: it assumes one type of visitor. Recruiter, investor, journalist, prospect, partner, friend — your form serves the same fields to all of them. None of them get what they actually came for.

Forms made sense in 2005, when shipping anything else cost a month of engineering. In 2026 we have voice models that can hold a real conversation in twenty-one languages. The form is a habit, not a constraint.

The hidden cost. A bad form doesn't just hurt conversion. It hurts your insight. You never learn what visitors actually wanted to ask — because the form gave them nowhere to ask it.

Form #1: the GoNoGo intake

A year ago our landing had a standard intake form. "Describe your startup idea." Twelve fields. Dropdowns for industry, stage, region. The usual.

Conversion was what you'd expect for a long form on a stranger's website. Bad.

We replaced it with voice intake. The landing greets you, asks one question, listens, asks the next one based on what you said. Three to four minutes total. No fields.

Here's what happened.

Completion almost tripled. Time on intake nearly doubled — but with completion, not friction. And the signal we got from a voice conversation contained four times more usable data than the form ever did, because the conversation could follow up on the interesting parts.

The form was the friction. Removing it tripled the conversion. The product behind it didn't change.

Form #2: the personal site

After GoNoGo, I kept seeing the same pattern everywhere. Product landings. About pages. Pricing pages. Contact pages. Every one of them: visitor arrives with questions, page hands them static text and a form, visitor leaves.

So I killed mine too.

tikhaev.team is my personal site. There is no About page, no project grid, no contact form. You land on it and within two seconds an avatar says hello and asks why you came. You speak. It answers.

A recruiter asks about my retail-ops background — it talks through 16 hypermarkets at Leroy Merlin, 150-person teams at Magnit.

An investor asks about traction — it talks numbers, patents, pilots.

A journalist asks for the origin story — it tells one.

A friend asks what I'm shipping this month — it knows.

Same page. Four different visitors. Four different conversations. No form ever opened.

Where to kill the next form (the actually useful part)

The pattern isn't a clever landing trick. It's about which touchpoints in your product are still forms when they could be conversations.

Audit yours. The usual suspects:

• Discovery / intake form on a landing page → voice discovery
• Contact form on About / Team page → conversational founder rep
• Demo request form → voice demo, no scheduling
• Customer onboarding form → guided voice walkthrough
• Job application form → voice screen for non-blocking first round
• Feedback / churn-survey form → 60-second voice exit interview

Each one shares the same anatomy: visitor has intent, your page demands typed structured input, intent dies in the gap.

You don't have to replace all of them. Pick one — the highest-volume one — and run the experiment.

The principle, plainly

If you give people a place to talk, they talk. If you give them a form, they leave.

Forms aren't bad — they're a tool with a narrow purpose. They work when you need structured fields for a database. They fail when you're trying to start a relationship.

Most of what founders put behind forms today isn't database input. It's a conversation that got compressed into checkboxes because conversations used to be expensive. They aren't anymore.

Try the principle live

Don't read another paragraph. Talk to the principle directly — right here in this article.

Press Start above. Microphone permission, then speak. Ask about retail ops, A³, GoNoGo, the patent, the pilots — anything. In any of twenty-one languages.

Or open the full versions in a new tab:

• 👉 tikhaev.team — my personal site. No buttons, no form. Just open it and start speaking.
• 👉 gonogo.team — the voice intake version. Validate a startup idea by talking, not typing.

Two seconds, no sign-up, no form. Whatever your reason for being there, ask. The site will answer.

That's what your form could be, too.

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Originally published on the GoNoGo blog.