For more about zack rozga and swurveys visit swurveys.com
About Steve Yanor (@skyalphabet)
Steve is the founder of Sky Alphabet, a digital marketing agency in Vancouver. When he’s not on Twitter he’s thinking about Twitter. Steve's background consists of advertising, IR, corporate communications and branding. He has worked on more than 25 IPOs with some of the best known CEOs and investment bankers in America, representing $45 billion in capital raised.
Steve has headed up several large international communication consultancies and is the author of "Roadshow: The Marketing of Corporate Finance", a book that discusses the tactics and strategies for implementing a best practices communications program for new equity listings (IPOs). You can chat with Steve by emailing him at syanor@skyalphabet.com or on twitter @skyalphabet or give him a call at (604) 710-1105.
How large is the survey market? I bet it's huge.
Yes. It is estimated that the online survey market in the US is about $2.2B. It is dominated by two players, but there are also hundreds of other niche players.
What are some of the dynamics of the survey market and what are your growth strategies to capture more share?
Certain verticals such as healthcare have lots of companies servicing vast array of needs. We intend to be a player in this market and focus on mobile which almost none of them are doing well. To us, the bigger opportunity is to be first to market with an engagement and feedback tool in the emerging technologies like VR and voice.
Those industries are projected to be very large and the opportunity now is to develop software for other developers to plug into their code.
What are your revenue streams?
We have two revenue streams. First, Swurveys data and engagement is on a per response model.
When you create an account you have a wallet that comes with 100 Swurveys Credits. As you get responses we draw down from that wallet. When you start to get low you get an alert to refill your wallet or you can set up an auto-refill.
This pricing methodology is more in line with the mobile advertising or in-app purchase model. To learn more about the Swurveys Credits system click here.
Second, we have a series of value-added services packages. Many customers have requested that we help them with their first Swurveys.
Whether it is design, question development or campaign consultation. So we have standardized our service offer for the most requested use cases. Click here to learn more.
Is there anything more that can be done because of the swiping instead of typing?
Swurveys have already been integrated into VR. Our unique design sets us up for all sorts of future forward technologies that traditional surveys are not suited. Ultimately, Swurveys will become a multi-channel platform where you go in make a single Swurvey and then decide which delivery method is best for you: AR/touch/VR/voice etc.
What are your marketing challenges?
One of the biggest challenges we face is that people have been doing the same old same old Survey for 20 years. Also, NPS has become pervasive so we have had to sell out tool outside of satisfaction (marketing, lead gen, employee satisfaction) at the moment in order to get a foot in the door with companies. Ultimately, I think our customers will see that our tool is a much better way to get more actionable data than NPS, but it will require a business process change.
This being said a lot of companies are willing to try something new because the old way of conducting this type of feedback is not yielding results. So I am very bullish on our prospects.
What are some of the other benefits of a Swurvey over a traditional survey?
As previously mentioned many companies have an embedded NPS process for satisfaction, so we have had to innovate on top of just getting feedback. We created the patent pending “See What Others Think” concept where each Swurvey provide back to the respondents 1 of the data points. On that page we also allow our customers to create a Call to Action. We have seen a number of our customers use this for incentives (get loyalty points, get a free cookie) or to actually sell product (tickets to events, donations to a non-profit)
I got an email from Preston your CTO today announcing that you are now offering branded Backgrounds that people can use for their Swurveys. That’s great! What’s next for Swurveys? Any major improvements or announcements coming?
Yes, sneak preview on an announcement coming out at the end of next week is that Swurveys will be offering a series of service packages. We have found that a lot of businesses love the Swurveys concept, but really want the entire white label effect that is possible with designing beautiful content cards and backgrounds. The packages that we are launching will let Swurveys build the theme, some complete Swurveys and a bundle of credits.
Also, in our near term development roadmap is rolling out a Lead Generation feature so that after a Swurvey is completed the user can provide their name, email address, phone number etc. to be contacted later.
Can a Swurvey capture anything related to an IP address or other form of identifying information for further aggregation or analysis?
At the moment we are not collecting that information. Much more is possible if we found that their were customers and use cases that warrant it and if it is within the sphere of legal and ethical concerns around privacy.
Are there are other SaaS companies out there that are comparable to Swurveys that are perhaps better known for any investors who might be reading this?
There are quite a few SaaS companies that are in the online surveying space (i.e. SurveyMonkey, Qualtrix) however, we are quite different form them because we focus our attention and design on improving the experience for the Taker.
Also, these are not really built for a mobile experience and they are not design and white-label oriented. Swurveys’ multi-channel approach puts us in a new class because we are taking a single model and applying it across platforms.
Are you planning on being at any conferences soon? It would be great to connect.
Well, yes. We are going to be a the Totem Summit in Whistler at the end of March. It is going to be an AMAZING and very different Tech Conference—a mix of adventure and business. If you or any of your readers want to go click this link to check it out and tell them Swurveys sent you.
swurv.in/2F2jNsMBH
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INTERVIEW WITH
zachary rozga
a seattle startup
INFLUENCER
Zachary Rozga @ZacharyRozga FOLLOWERS: 1k
Mentions: Seattle, Startup, Influencer, Zack Rozga, Swurveys
...
HOW ZACK ROZGA SWIPED HIS WAY
INTO THE BILLION DOLLAR SURVEY MARKET
The interview with a Seattle startup that embedded itself into a data-gathering empire by solving for apathy.
...
The #INFLUENCER interview with Zachary Rozga, CEO, Swurveys @zacharyRozga (Vol. 7)
I met Zack Rozga on Twitter. He’s the CEO of Swurveys (@swurveon), a really interesting SaaS company based in Seattle. His company provides a better way to do surveys.
Swurveys has improved upon the traditional survey by collecting data by gestures. In other words, you swipe to answer questions. For example, instead of typing or clicking a radio button you swipe right or down.
When I tried it I was immediately impressed with how Swurveys had taken something you never think much about -- the survey -- and made it more fun.
As it turns out, improving how people take surveys offer a lot benefits to the folks that actually use the data.
The more I looked into the company and the market, the more I was convinced that Swurveys is a perfect example of how a startup can have a huge impact in markets where mobile is overtaking desktop to a greater extent every day.
Hey Zack! Thanks for taking the time to do this. I saw that the CEO of T-Mobile commented on one of your Twitter posts. Do you find Twitter a good marketing platform for your company?
At our company we are novices when it comes to Twitter. I feel we are just now beginning to understand the power of the social network. Basically, you can reach anyone you want on Twitter and if you are persistent enough a percentage of them will actually write you back. I have found a number of thought leaders and influencers (present party included) that believe many of the same things that I do about the sorry state of Customer Experience and Feedback through Twitter and now some offline partnerships are unfolding.
I’ve met many of your team on Twitter. Tell me about how you found these great people.
Three of the co-founders (me, Ruby Love and Bojie) worked together at a previous venture. It was a management consulting firm and it is where Swurveys was born. We were running two concurrent projects that focused on college students and were getting an abysmal sub 1% response rate. The frustration and realization that we MUST do something different lead to the birth of Swurveys. Preston was working at Amazon in the cloud computing division and had the dream of building a completely serverless company and Swurveys offered that opportunity. He also personally loves the challenge of pushing the envelope of what is possible to build in the cloud and how close we can come to a native app experience in mobile web.
The first time we talked on the phone you indicated that you have a ton of experience doing surveys around the world. Tell me about that.
Yes, the first company I started was about 12 years ago in Cape Town, South Africa. The company was a consulting company and we did work for various government agencies and the World Bank Group all throughout the Global South.
We had projects in countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, Laos, Vanuatu, Cambodia, Brazil, Mexico and Cape Verde. In total I worked in about 40 countries over an 8 year period. Our projects were focused on Private Sector Development and in particular competitiveness in the tourism and hospitality industry. We specialized in simple star grading for locally-owned properties and developed a basic system that was transversal across geographies, language and culture.
"what I learned over many thousands of surveys that, at the end of the day, there’s not much useable data. And obviously that’s a huge problem."
So you built the Swurvey to address what you considered to be significant challenges that face traditional surveys? Tell me a bit about the product.
Well, as I mentioned there’s a lack of data that traditional surveys generate. Survey takers are tired of being asked for their feedback in the monotonous academic style that has been going on since the online survey industry was created 20 years ago. This apathy has resulted in response rates of less than 2%, and the vast majority of those responses being negative.
Here’s one anecdote. We have a customer in the fast food industry who told me the real problem with feedback has been the mass adoption of the Net Promotor Score (NPS)
Okay. What’s that?
You know when they ask: “On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend Brand X to you friends and family?”
Yes.
Well, this single metric has been pushed throughout all industries as a magic bullet – a panacea to measuring customer sentiment. Rather than going into a long written explanation with what is wrong with NPS I’d rather share a video from a new friend (kindred spirit), James Bodkins, of mine where he breaks down what is wrong with the net promoter score.