April 8th, 2011

Survey Share: An Eight Year Old New Startup

Posted by: KatieB | No Comments »

What’s the difference between a project and a startup? Ask Andy, the developer who took over a professor’s project, SurveyShare, eight years after originally building it as an independent contractor. I like to call Andy my hacker sensei, startup advisor and happily, boyfriend as well. Read on to hear about Andy’s adventures with purchasing a startup.

Eight years is a long time! What was SurveyShare like eight years ago?

SurveyShare was an idea in Curt Bonk‘s mind. Curt is a professor of education at Indiana University, where I went for undergrad. He had this idea, and he was a visionary. At the time, the only competitors in the online survey space were SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang. He had this vision for survey site where anyone could create a survey and get results in under ten minutes. He wanted a site that was more targeted towards academia. A site that had more templates, more statistics, and was geared towards course evaluation, faculty evaluation, and academic research. Back then, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing – we had a team of five people trying to figure it out. I think we did a pretty good job with what we were back then.

How did SurveyShare get start getting users? What did it look like in those first years?

It took several years to build a customer base – probably 3 or 4 years until it was ramen profitable. Curt personally funded the whole operation. For the first few years, we had four employees working full-time – myself, another programmer, a person doing templates full time, and another person doing customer service. That was before social media was a buzzword – word about SurveyShare spread by word of mouth.

We have Curt to thank for the global traffic we have now – Curt Bonk has traveled all over the world, giving talks on distance learning, and technology and education. It goes without saying that speaking to people in person is really important. If you can reach people in person, go do it – they will remember you and use your tool. One of my greatest strengths is that people can call me and get a real person – the programmer and owner of the company – and people like being able to connect a tool with a friendly face or voice.

How did you come to purchase SurveyShare?

I left in 2005 to go to grad school at UNC. I thought I wanted to get a PhD studying content distribution networks, in systems networking. After three years, I realized that as a career, I prefer making websites that help people.

People need simple access to qualitative and quantitative feedback. Watching SurveyShare from the first years I was involved, I really thought SurveyShare could be pushed further. By the time I left grad school, Curt no longer had the passion for SurveyShare he once had – SurveyShare hadn’t changed much from when I’d last been on the project. Curt’s a professor of education, and didn’t have the time keep pushing SurveyShare forward.

Curt’s a wonderful guy, and I’d stayed in touch with him – visiting or meeting him for a drink whenever I was back in Bloomington. I knew he wanted to sell, and it was perfect timing for me to buy it. We agreed on a price based on a multiple of the trailing twelve months’ earnings, and made the deal last June.

What was the first thing you did once you were the new owner?

I rewrote the entire codebase and completely scrapped all the old code. I’ve been told that you should never do this. However, I implemented a majority of the old code base and have internalized many of its quirks and flaws. I’ve learned a lot since leaving SurveyShare for grad school.

The code needed to be more efficient. Now, a user who has ten thousand responses to a survey can see the results and analysis in about a second, whereas in the old codebase that would’ve taken 10-20 seconds. After that, the user experience and UI needed to be much better. Katie and I created the graphics, and SurveyShare looked much better at that point. I started offering all our templates for free, because I want everyone to be have all the tools they need to develop great, effective surveys.

So if you rewrote the whole codebase, why did you decide to buy SurveyShare, versus starting a new site?

I bought a startup because it already had a customer base, and revenue. That takes so long to build; it’s like having a five year head start. The price was reasonable, and I knew it would be profitable from day one.

How did you change as a developer, from working on SurveyShare to actually owning the company?

I had to consider customer service more. For a web startup, excellent customer service is important; it’s your public face. I needed to consider the interface more. As an employee, I was more interested in a paycheck. As the owner, I’m much more interested in how people perceive my tool, and what the customers want. It’s amazing how your motivation changes, and how much more you get done in a day, when you change from employee to owner. I’m more concerned with doing things right, knowing that I’m building the code for myself and my customers forever. The original code I wrote as an undergrad was 8 years ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then.

What unexpected challenges have you faced since taking over SurveyShare?

If anything, it’s how people use SurveyShare in ways that I don’t expect. Whether it’s for research, or customer service, they do things and want things that I don’t expect. They want an email when someone completes a response, or control over all the incomplete responses, or a different type of data I haven’t thought about. My users always surprise me. This is why I try to listen carefully to my users and react to their feedback, or implement features they suggest.

What’s your vision for the direction for the future direction of SurveyShare?

I would like to make it as easy as possible to collect feedback. This could mean offering surveys on Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, whatever the easiest way is to reach your users and make it easy for them to give feedback. This also means making it very very easy to create a survey and ask the types of questions you want to ask. I also want to use social media to keep track with my own users and their needs. If a person has a request, I want to be able to respond to their needs. It’s important that if a person is having trouble, that I know about it.

What advice do you have for other startup founders?

No one will like what you do. When I redesigned the site, someone told me it looked like a two-year-old’s coloring book. Despite this, listen to the feedback. Customers will tell you what they want to buy. Customer feedback – when constructive – is priceless.

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