Josh Little likes to call himself a “qwizard.” He’s a former teacher and serial entrepreneur who has spent his career building a better mousetrap, so to speak, when it comes to training, marketing, and sales. Now, with his latest venture, called Qzzr, Little has found a new way to engage customers and generate sales leads: through BuzzFeed-style quizzes for enterprises.
“Last year, the number one article on the New York Times website was a quiz that figured out where people were from based on how they talked,” says Little. “Eight out of ten of the most-shared articles online are quizzes. The world has given its blessing to quizzes, and few pieces of content have the same true virality to the nth degree.”
Little and his co-founder, Bucky Flowers, officially launched Qzzr late last month with the goal of building a “hyperfast, beautiful” quiz tool to drive social traffic to its customers’ sites. Qzzr comes in both free and professional versions, and the professional version offers the ability to capture leads and white label quizzes. The cost per month for the pro version ranges from $19 to $499.
Qzzr already has partnerships with ESPN, College Humor, Reddit, and Yahoo, among others—sites that want some of that engagement magic, Little says, that quizzes uniquely offer.
Little says Qzzr’s technology allows share redirects back to the customer, and after the quiz, users are presented with a targeted offer. So far, he adds, Qzzr has a conversion rate of 14 percent for sales leads and 22 percent for special offers.
“I like to use the word bonkers,” he says. “Nothing converts that well on the Internet.”
Little says his competitors are focused on quizzes as a “quick win” to lure traffic cheaply without an eye toward monetization or lead generation. By contrast, he says Qzzr is more interested in building a tool that is fully responsive and mobile: “They don’t have the powerful features Qzzr has. We’re 100 percent focused on interaction.”
Investors are also betting that Qzzr has created something special. Last month, the company raised a $2 million seed round led by the Kickstart Seed Fund, with Pelion Venture Partners, Peterson Partners, and Ann Arbor’s RPM Ventures participating. Though Little is now based in Salt Lake City, UT, he previously ran Kalamazoo, MI-based training and development website Maestro and Austin, TX-based Bloomfire, a collaborative work platform.
So far, Qzzr has experienced 33 percent month-over-month growth, Little says, with more than 150 new people signing up to take quizzes each day. The company, which has eight employees, will begin raising a Series A round next spring, and its ultimate goal is to work with marketers and publishers as they engage customers using the social web.
“We already have firms that are proposing investment, but we feel like we still have a lot to prove as far as traction goes,” Little says.
