name to Plixi, and getting acquired (by Seattle-based Lockerz) for $10 million.
The Plixi/TweetPhoto team stayed on with Lockerz for two years, and Callahan says they all wanted to stay together for their next venture.
Of course, the SlimSurveys founders acknowledge that they also are facing an 800-pound gorilla in SurveyMonkey, the Palo Alto, CA-based online survey provider founded in 1999. SurveyMonkey claims to be the world’s largest survey company, with over 1 million survey responses every day, and was valued at more than $1.3 billion after it completed a $794 million debt-and-equity financing round completed earlier this year.
So Callahan is casting SlimSurveys as the “anti-SurveyMonkey,” and arguing that the simplicity and brevity of SlimSurveys’ questionnaires assures higher customer response rates. SlimSurveys says it also makes it easy for businesses to add photos and images to their survey questions, and customers can embed surveys on their own websites.
“We learned from Twitter that people have a short attention span,” Callahan says. “We’re not your typical SurveyMonkey, where we give you all the tools under the sun to build your surveys.”
In a statement issued today, Rumford, who is SlimSurvey’s chief product officer, expands on that premise, saying, “The current offering of survey tools on the market has not changed much in a decade. Most surveys today look just like they did a decade ago. Antiquated, ugly, radio buttons everywhere, complex matrixes and lots of questions. This is a time drain for consumers. It was time for the survey to be re-imagined and reinvented and this is what we have done with a focus on the consumer experience with our product.”
So far, SlimSurveys’ co-founders have been developing the software themselves and funding the corporate development out of their own pockets. But with today’s product debut, Callahan says he expects to raise a seed round between $500,000 and $1 million in the next month or two.
