Some friends of mine have created a very cool new start-up called
Firepoll. It’s like combining Instant Messaging with Surveys
… and you get paid for it! Well … if you have the right
identity.
What they created is a small IM-like service that you install on your
machine. You then register with their server, and they ask you a
lot of identity/profile information. All of this is stored at
their server. Companies interested in doing market research can
then visit the Firepoll web site and subscribe to do “Instant
Surveys”. Through a web page they select all of the attributes of
the target market that they are interested in surveying, and in
real-time they can see how many of “those” people are currently
on-line. They can then design their survey through their browser,
and select which “rewards” they are offering for completed surveys.
Lastly, they indicate how many survey results they want and when they
post the survey it is sent – instantly – to all of the on-line
community members who match the profile that was defined. As soon
as enough people have replied, the survey is closed.
As a user of Firepoll, I have it running on my machine all of the
time. When a survey is created, where I match the demographic
profile requested, I get a small pop-up message on my machine.
When I click the message my browser is launched directly to the survey,
and the first question is “Which reward do you want?” I can get
things like MP3 music, $1 to my PayPal account, discount coupons,
etc. I then proceed to answer the survey questions, and then post
my results. I get an e-mail with my reward notification in
minutes. The entire process is a clean and simple experience.
To me, this is a facinating solution for a number of reasons …
combining many facets of the Internet into one powerful solution that
really leverages the power of distributed networks. On top of
that, I can leverage my identity – or the one that I define and create
– to actually generate money.
It’s a cool product … I’d love to hear feedback from others on what they think of it!