We got tired of
docs that lied.
Forma was built by two engineers who spent too many late nights debugging against documentation that hadn't been updated since the last major release. We built the tool we needed and opened it up. Turns out a lot of people had the same problem.
Lena and I were both at a SaaS company in Berlin. We shipped fast, broke things, patched them. The documentation was always three sprints behind. New engineers onboarding would file bugs against behaviors that we'd changed six months earlier and just hadn't bothered to document.
We tried every tool. Docusaurus, Mintlify, Notion, Confluence, hand-written markdown in the repo. The problem wasn't the format — it was the workflow. Documentation was always an afterthought, always someone's job to do after the actual work was done.
So we built Forma on a long weekend. The idea: if the docs are generated from the code, they can't lie. They're not a separate artifact someone maintains — they're a consequence of the code itself.
We launched on Hacker News in September 2024 with a three-paragraph post and woke up to 800 signups. We've been building full-time since October. Forma is now a team of four, based in Berlin and Tallinn.
Four people. One problem.
Lena Kovač
Co-founder, CEO
Former backend lead at Pitch. Obsessed with developer experience and very opinionated about changelogs.
Felix Bauer
Co-founder, CTO
Built the first version of Forma in 72 hours. Has opinions about parsers that he will share if you ask (and sometimes if you don't).
Ines Saraiva
Design
Came from Figma's product team. Makes Forma look like something an engineer would actually enjoy using, which is harder than it sounds.
Tobias Han
Growth
Was a developer for six years before switching to growth. Understands what developers actually hate about software (everything).