In this “always on” era of online products and services, there is a time-saving appeal to the product introduced today by San Diego-based SlimSurveys. It’s designed to help businesses gather feedback from customers without sucking up too much of their time.
“We wanted to build a company from the perspective of the survey respondent,” CEO Sean Callahan tells me. So SlimSurveys has developed an online platform that limits each survey to just seven questions, enabling customers to quickly rate their satisfaction in various ways, so the survey experience will last no more than 30 seconds.
Think of it as the Twitter of surveys, Callahan says.
It’s not just a clever turn of phrase. Callahan, along with SlimSurveys co-founders Rodney Rumford and Daniel Marashlian, have been steeped in the ins and outs of Twitter at their previous venture, a photo-sharing platform that was founded in 2009 as TweetPhoto. They quickly expanded their TweetPhoto API beyond Twitter to include Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, and other social media networks. Callahan says TweetPhoto empowered third-party application developers to quickly add media-sharing capabilities to their apps without taking on the job of building and managing the infrastructure themselves.
“We grew that company rather quickly, from zero to 30 million [users] in just 18 months—and that was just our website,” Callahan says. Now he is looking to follow a similar strategy with SlimSurveys.
In an e-mail this afternoon, Callahan writes that the startup’s ultimate goal is “disrupting the survey industry and turning it into a time-saving experience for millions of consumers…We want to build an amazing product people love to interact and express with on a daily basis.”
But there’s little doubt that the SlimSurveys founders hope to repeat the broader success of TweetPhoto as well. The photo-sharing startup raised $2.6 million in venture capital (from Qualcomm Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and Eastman Kodak) before changing its
