A mantra you’ve probably heard many times in the startup world is “getting out of the building” and talking to your customers (coined by none other than Steve Blank). Market research & customer development is critical to building a product that your customers actually want. Because, after all, you’re building the product for, well…your customers.
Sometimes, though, those desk chains ain’t coming off and you still gots to have that data.
MicroHero Surveys is a new iOS app that enables marketers to easily design surveys, collect people to take the surveys and provide those survey participants with a particularly satisfying reward for their efforts.
First, they do all the legwork of sourcing an appropriate, engaged audience. Then, in exchange for their time and feedback, instead of incentivizing respondents with cash, MicroHero allows them to make contributions to one of over 200 charities affiliated with the application!
The tool itself is basic but well designed. All the surveys are created inside the app itself and optimized for all screens with special attention to the mobile experience (apparently 50% of survey emails are opened on a mobile device). For the response input experience, there are more than enough options from which to choose; the app offers seven different types of survey question styles that range from sliders and images to text, rankings and more.
Directly on your smartphone you can view all submission data and analytics. If you’d prefer the traditional desktop route, MicroHero offers the option to share reports via email, attaching the survey data in a spreadsheet.
Marketing budgets can be tight, so the pricing is refreshingly competitive; using a sourced audience, you’ll pay $0.10 per survey respondent. Compared to SurveyMonkey’s pricing – $1.00 and up per respondent – that’s pretty significant savings to add on to an already financially appealing charity model.
If you prefer to just use the software and wrangle your own audience, they have a fairly standard monthly pricing model that runs between $49 – $99/month.
It remains to be seen if the social impact and mobile first features of MicroHero Surveys will be enough to make it stand out in an otherwise crowded market. Twitter has even confirmed that it’s experimenting with polls in a tweet.
At the very least MicroHero Surveys is a thoughtfully designed app and a slick new take on surveys.
Plus, who doesn’t like saving the world by clicking a few radio buttons?
SnapMunk
This is a great idea. There are so many survey websites out there you can barely get a good experience from most of them. Being able to donate to charity might give people more of an incentive to do more surveys. It also helps that it would be on mobile device since that is something people are carrying with them non-stop.
You’d be surprised by the amount of incredible knowledge you can get just from surveying your audience. I know of a few bloggers who use this to great results. One guy I’m thinking of basically used surveys to gather his audience’s thoughts on everything about his book. From the name, what it would cover, to the cover design itself. Turns out that his book was a resounding victory for him. I would suggest everyone start getting feedback from their audience as soon as possible and ramp up their ROI. After all, it’s your audience who you are serving, may as well see what they like straight from the horses mouth.