Santa Cruz, CA-based UserVoice is taking a couple of steps to break its product free from the in-crowd of early adopters that have increasingly turned to using its service for streamlining internal and customer feedback aggregation.
In addition, the startup had announced that it has raised an extra $800,000 from a well-known group of investors, led by Baseline Ventures and joined by FF Angel (the seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery and Howard Lindzon.
UserVoice is essentially a hosted way for businesses to intelligently process the feedback it gets from employees and customers, acting as a social idea generator of sorts. This has proven to be a great way for software companies and web application developers to incorporate the tool into their product websites, basically extending their existing product feedback channels with a way for users to voice their opinions on new features, roadmap, etc.
But UserVoice rightly recognizes that there are a lot of corporations and institutions (think education, healthcare, government bodies, etc.) that can benefit from such a service too, and aims to package its main product somewhat differently in order to cater to those as well.
For that reason, it’s today releasing a white-label solution that enables its customers to embed branded widgets and communities into their websites and facilitate the streamlining of the aggregation and moderation of incoming suggestions, voting, and user feedback. These widgets can be fully customized with the ability to change the CSS, templates, language files, and more. Along with this, UserVoice is introducing ZeroLogin, a method for users to sign in to UserVoice with the same username and password as the company website that deployed its solution. To see such an integration in action, check out this feedback page on Animoto’s website, which is entirely powered by UserVoice.
Last but not least, UserVoice let us know that it has attracted a very knowledgeable advisor to help the company gain more traction: Bob Pearson, who spearheaded IdeaStorm at Dell as the company’s former vice president of communities and conversations.
Expect to hear more from this company in the future.
“[UserVoice] has raised an extra $800,000 from a well-known group of investors” is a good beginning for a tech company. But I don’t see any revolutionary stuff in the technology it offers.
who said a business had to be revolutionary to succeed?
One man’s revolution is another man’s meh.
I think UserVoice can be revolutionary in the right implementations. It completely changes the way organizations listen to and interact with their customers/members/users, and it does so with a white-label, turn-key solution.
Isn’t this just a clone of another service that offers this?
again, SO WHAT? its called competition. google it.
There are competitors in the space, but UV is definitely no clone. Many people know this, which is why UserVoice is taking off.
Hmmm, like that they raised cash, but…….
This is not rocket science. Salesforce acquired a similar company, Kenlet two years ago for reported $2M-$4M.
Congrats UserVoice team!
Thanks so much Daniel!
Well done Marcus.
I like the fact that you’ve got your photo in the “Call us” area. Nice personal touch.
That said, I’ve spent about an hour checking out the service and the verdict – a solid product with a solid business model.
However you may want to listen to some of your users and provide white-label UIs across the premium plans.
That said, good job so far. Well done UserVoice team. Good luck!
Niyi
Trafficspaces.com
ditto, huge congrats, glad you guys can now focus on the making this huge
Congratulations to UserVoice!
beatiful
It would have been better if there are options to provide – feedback or bug reporting with defined options. Often people are reluctant to enter information, a simple radio options will make it user friendly.
Congrats to the UserVoice team. To the comments that the technology isn’t revolutionary, or that other companies also provide similar services, so what? Technology is entrance stakes. Execution is the key to success in a service like this, and based on my experience with the UserVoice system, they really grok that design and implementation is important. Something doesn’t have to be rocket science in order to be useful and profitable.
I second that. Not every company needs billion dollar IP or innovation to be “worthy”… they just need to __do what they do well__. And, they are clearly doing it very well based on the traction they have right now. Well done UserVoice!
Sounds like a really great product! Along the same lines, Adaptive Engeering’s Concourse 3 Unified Communications messaging product is transforming customer call centers worldwide. Adaptive designs applications to help enterprises increase productivity by simplifying the way employees communicate and interact, applying fresh visual metaphors to textual data, applications or systems, and decreasing the time it takes users to learn and react to a situation. http://www.adaptiveengine.com
Congrats to the UserVoice team, it has been amazing to watch you grow!
Congrats to UserVoice and the whole team (new and old)
Love uservoice! Great people there… wish them nothing but success!
@Samuel Ryan – You are right, there are several simliar offerings on the market…
Our WebStorm product is similiar but targeted at larger enterprises like Adobe, Cisco, Intel…(not start-ups)
http://www.brig...ea.com/webstorm
There are other turnkey services
- http://www.KindlingApp.com
- http://www.IdeaScale.com
- http://www.pligg.com (open source)
Our company has a paid account with UserVoice and we love it. Makes it very helpful to try to prioritize what work needs to be addressed. Their system forces our end-users to prioritize what is important to them instead of just saying that “it’s all important”. It’s helped communication in both directions with our customers.
Everyone that I’ve talked to at the company has been great to deal with as well.
That’s it!
Where’s my credit card?
Well done User Voice.
As Steve Jobs said: Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
Great job UserVoice. It’s been a pleasure watching you guys grow and it’s clear you’re going to make this work. Keep up the good work
Congrats to UserVoice. I’m a community manager and it’s tools like this which make our lives easier. The more you can effectively visualize what your community wants and desires the better you can act on it.
Nice job to Rich, Marcus, and the whole team at UserVoice! It’s been so cool to watch you guys grow at NextSpace. What’s special about these guys? Hard work and relentless execution. Keep it up!
Great! Congrats to UserVoice.
happy to be both a user & investor in UserVoice… congrats guys & keep up the great work