TC50 DemoPit company AskYourTargetMarket is hoping to simplify market research for businesses and solutions by offering a comprehensive platform where businesses can both create and deploy surveys. Since the site is in closed beta, AskYourTargetMarket has offered 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Each invite comes with a free survey package for up to 50 respondents; enter the beta code “TC50-2009″ here.
The site lets you define your target market demographic, then write a survey to distribute to focus groups. Because you are able to target a particular group, you don’t have to waste space on your survey with demographic questions. Once your survey is finalized, AskYourTargetMarket will launch it to your desired demographic within their consumer panel for as little as $29.95 for 50 respondents. The site, which says it has thousands of U.S. consumers on their survey panel, draws its respondents from its sister site, InstantCashSweepstakes.com, which offers users a cash prize incentive for filling out surveys. AskYourTargetMarket is also developing its own “worker site” where members will get paid per question and will be ranked by a detailed algorithm which will determine their pay scale per question.
Once your survey has been deployed, results can be delivered in a few minutes up to 72 hours. Upon receiving the results, the site will offer you tools to create a easily shareable report with analysis and distribution of the results, through charts and graphs.
While the company hasn’t tweaked its pricing yet, its founders tell us that they hope to provide survey options with up to 400 respondents under $100. This price point is definitely appealing considering how expensive it can be to conduct market research. SurveyMonkey (which is growing fast) and Survs.com offer in-depth survey options but don’t offer AskYourTargetMarket’s consumer panel.
Someone from this company should contact me.
matt@unitedsample.com
you could email them yourself!
While might offer the ability to email surveys to your own mailing list as a free feature at some point, but if that is what you are looking for then we recommend Survey Monkey or Survs.
Our goal something altogether new. We wanted to put the complete package together as a self-service platform at a price that everyone can afford. We have integrated the consumer panel, a way to drill-down and define your target market, compose a survey, launch it to that segment of our consumer panel that matches your target market and then hand you the tools to analyze the results.
David,
Like the idea & like the look of the tool. H/E, quality will determine whether you gain adoption. At these prices, I’d have to question the strength of your panel. Your incentives have to be next to nothing. Any insights here?
He means that Matt could email your company himself rather than asking your company to email him.
would be nice if there is a free version… for like 50-100 max person can take the survey…
Why? This isn’t really a consumer oriented thing.
I tried out the free code and it says I have 20 credits available but my survey (50 respondants) needs me to purchase -63 credits more :) Not sure what’s going on here.
As soon as you actually begin to define your target market, they raise it above the 20 credits given to beta users to test out their product.
Do they want beta testers or just customers?
We want beta testers.
We will be reloading the beta accounts during the coming days and weeks with additional credits in incremental amounts, which will allow larger numbers of respondents and more complex targeting. In the mean time please try a simple 50 respondent, non-drilled down survey as your first. Your comments about your experience are very much appreciated at david@askyourtargetmarket.com
Thanks and cheers.
Thanks for the clarification, David. Will be testing out the service, analyzing the results from my user experience perspective, and posting on my blog eventually.
I could create a short (3 questions) but targeted (employed ppl making $75K – $500K) survey for DocSnaps for 29 credits. The available credits for beta testers is 30.
If I get good responses I would be a happy paying customer.
App looks good, but UI could be improved. Good job!
Thanks, Vinai!
We are constantly working on improving the UI. One of the purposes of this test drive is to identify such weak points and fix them. I would appreciate if you could send me specific feedback on UI elements that you would improve (lev@askytm.com). Btw, your DocSnaps Web site looks very clean and professional.
Good luck with your results! Hope you’ll receive them shortly and well-cooked.
Thanks,
Lev
While I admire the intended uses of this web application, I question its usability. Companies that offer money for consumer feedback have to be very cautious of people gaming the system. If I can zip through a dozen surveys of no more than 5 questions each and get paid x dollars for my troubles, chances are I’ll do it as quick as I can just to earn a buck – with little regard to my actual answers.
Now, if I’m enticed to fill out a survey because I’m convinced that I’m participating in valuable feedback that the company is going to put to use, I’ll do it for free AND make sure I answer truthfully and with thought.
Additionally, I think AskYourTargetMarket needs to look at THEIR target market and see what they can do to offer more of a ROI to their end users. What I mean is, based on the quick tour I went through and the example analytics report they provided – there is little guidance into what questions should be asked. In fact all 3 questions in the example survey analytics are downright horrible survey questions. They’re entirely too vague, the available answers are too broad in some areas and too specific in others and some of the answers are completely irrelevant to question – “You prefer to pay…?” – “for my very own snowboard/ski/bike/kayak.” How does this pertain to a local gym?
The fact is, if I just want to run a casual survey, I’ll use a free service or some widget on a wordpress install or something similar. If I am going to pay for a service like AYTM, which does seem to offer nice reporting and the demographic targeting as well, then I’m going to want to be able to understand the results I get and put them to use. If I’m not knowledgeable enough to put together a well constructed survey with focused and targeted questions, then I’m throwing money out the door using a service like this because the results are only as good as the questions. I guess my point is, if they’re targeted more serious clients who want actionable information – they should also be looking into assisting those same clients with survey construction to be sure they’re getting the most out of their 5 questions. Otherwise, the users are going to start complaining that the analytics provided by AYTM are worthless and do not offer what they need to put the information to use, when in fact it was probably a poor survey design that was the cause.
Just my 2 sense after working in Mystery Shopping for 4 years. ;)
Hi Wesley,
Thanks for your detailed feedback on our service model and your first impressions!
Let me comment on each of your paragraphs:
1. “While I admire the intended uses…”
The users in our consumer panel can’t zip through dozens of surveys. We have several levels of protection:
Our Doublecheck’d option is one excellent way to ensure that your questions are answered thoughtfully, because unless respondents answer your survey exactly the same way twice during two sessions more than 3 hours apart, their response is discarded and their priority to receive surveys in the future is negatively affected. Also, our ability to see folks’ response patterns from the millions of surveys they have answered gives us an excellent baseline for their consistency and claimed demographics integrity. Finally – we limit each session to only 5 surveys that they can reply to.
2. “Now, if I’m enticed to fill out…”
Agreed, but in most cases we fill out that kind of surveys when we are extremely pleased or pissed off with the service/product OR do it for some kind of a discount, coupons or prize drawing that a business incentivize us with. It’s hard to get a neutral honest response from a regular customer for free. A lot of small businesses don’t have such ability at all as they don’t have the money, customers or a platform to do so… which leads us to your next point:
3. “Additionally, I think AskYourTargetMarket needs to look at THEIR target market… ”
We do know our own target market. We position ourselves as an excellent solution for web and brick-and-mortar businesses, start-ups, student researchers, marketing agencies, bloggers etc. who have questions they want to ask to a specificс group of people, but don’t want to spam their own peers by asking to fill out a SurveyMonkey poll or just don’t have enough contacts in their available target audience to help them make a right business decision. Our prospect users can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for a classic market research that takes months to complete, they want to decide which logo to choose or which pizza topping to add to their menu. They need to be able to afford such service, design and launch a survey on-demand and get results before they become outdated.
As far as our demo survey – We will change it to a better example, thanks for your fair criticism here.
4. “The fact is, if I just want to run a casual survey…”
We do want our clients to have valuable meaningful information and we will be coming up with help articles to coach them and share the best practices to do so. (By the way, we are looking for a knowledgeable person who could help us come up with such texts… are you interested?). We believe that adding a customer rep to assist clients may defeat the on-demand aspect of the business although I can imagine having somebody on a web chat for a quick assistance in future. We give you retrospective filters allowing to see results filtered by demographic criteria that you may have never ordered in the first place, we show results on the map and allow even to drill down to each response. We recently used our own service ourselves for business planning, picked a name for our next site and learned that our consumers are very opinionated and helpful when it comes to making a proper business decision; e.g.: before investing into a brand name that has less chances to become successful than your other choice.
Again, I really appreciate your feedback. Please feel free to e-mail me at lev@askytm.com with further questions.
Lev
I have actually tested this with a quiz i needed andswered. Seems to work nice AND FAST so far :)
how is that panel statistically representative of anything?garbage in, garbage out. however, if you can get hold of a good random sample and still demographically profile them, you should be able to reach that price point. good luck with that.
Hi zrgiu,
Please read my reply to Wesley where I describe the ways we use to protect our future clients from inaccurate answers and supply as meaningful data as possible.
Thanks,
Lev
Sorry – my last reply should’ve been addressed to Dave!
zrgiu – glad you have a good experience!
Too bad there is no branching or skipping logic in surveys, I think this kind of service really needs that.
Hi Allan,
The branched logic surveys are coming. We really can’t wait to roll them out but they are in development now. I agree with you – our surveys will definitely get a new dimension with ability to write 30+ question and 150+ possible answers while keeping the survey as short and sweet as now for the end respondent. Stay tuned!
Lev
Sounds good, looking forward to seeing what you come up with
This looks very similar to a startup that launched a few months ago at bootupcamp in Sydney called ‘judgeitnow.com’.
Seem to be really nice startup. Actually it is the missing part in the puzzle that our company was looking for in the business plan.
Great one research, thanks for telling about it.
The demographics supplied in answers seem questionable, I have 4 Students with an Income of $100,000 – $200,000 in my answers, actually these students are the only ones with that high an income.
A very fair comment that should concern all researchers and research providers.
Income in our demographics profile is household income, not personal income so a student could be married or single but living in a household (parents) with that income range.
We have a huge amount of non-personally identifiable data on our respondents because they fill out hundreds of “fun” surveys@ that we analyze for consistency, reliability and credibility. We already incentivize consistency by rewarding members who answer a survey the same way twice when shown it again randomly on a separate session. Before we come out of closed beta our consumer panel will see their “trust score” and be incentivized to provide honest anonymous demographics and survey responses. However, we believe that honesty is already the norm based upon many test surveys we have launched.
Still the only 4 people with high income appear as students, I just doesn’t add up.
Also on respodend claims to have tried http://obsurvey.com to conduct surveys. That seems highly unlikely (although not impossible) But I don’t have very high traffic numbers on that site yet.
Great idea. I can think of about 6 surveys I’ll run for my various businesses once the closed beta is opened. Bravo.
Thanks Moses!
We work hard to launch AYTM public beta and help you and all other future customers make right business decision.
Lev
OR….you could just use amazons mechanical turk and set your own price and have instant access to thousands of participants. c’mon folks this just isn’t innovative.
Hi Jonathan,
It’s true, you can use amazons MT for such task BUT:
1. how would you quality control the answers?
2. how would you target your survey ONLY to the people you need?
Would you buy 10k of responses hoping that you’ll get a 100 that you need in your target market???
3. Alternatively – asking only users with certain demographics to take the HIT won’t work – they just want their money so you’d be encouraging them to lie in order to be hired.
4. Where are the tools on MT to see the charts, responses on the map, retrospectively filter them, share the reports, print in a nice format etc.?
5. Finally – I’m sure that a lot of our prospect client may never even heard of MT, they need a clean, accurate, intuitive and nicely wrapped product which we provide.
We are not saying that we are the first ones on the market who got this brilliant idea – ask web users to fill out surveys… We just don’t see any service available with our price point, characteristics and feature set.
Lev
My only question is how are you certain that your focus groups are who they say they are? It’s crucial to your business model that your focus groups are actually composed of people with the corresponding demographics, how are you able to assure your customers of this? Does everyone in a focus group sign up online? Do you have a way to verify their facts? Great idea, I’m just interested in how you’re handling these things.
Hi there, FinanceAnswers!
We have our own consumer panel – we built and grew it on our sister site, asking users for demographics during registration (same demographics you can drill through at AYTM). Our ability to see folks’ response patterns from the millions of surveys they have answered gives us an excellent baseline for their consistency and claimed demographics integrity.
Lev
This is no where near the “first”….. this is just the latest incarnation of a decade old idea.
LiquidCool Freeform platform existed in 1995.
NFO’s AnswerMan, later spun off as InsightExpress.com….
and Greenfield Online’s QuickTake product all beat these guys.
Even ToLuna has a QuickSurvey service. This isn’t even to mention the dozens of others like the Zoomerang’s of the world.
While their GUI is nicely done, the sample source is nowhere near the caliber of true online research.
I once paid over $3500 for an InsightExpress survey with less than 400 respondents, no survey writing help nor assistance with results analysis. That was the inspiration for AskYourTargetMarket.com. AYTM is completely self-service, available 24/7 (after we’re out of closed beta) and priced for the rest of us. Surveys start at $29.95. It’s meant for students, start-ups and small biz’s. Correct me if I’m wrong but do any of the services you named provide a self-service platform with the consumer panel fully integrated or do you have to call their sales department? What do they charge? But, ultimately, you must be the judge of our value proposition.
Its a nice niche offer that is done pretty well, but it’s going to be great for mainly the cheaper end of research folks. Great for a small biz or startup trying to research some consumer grade market demographics provided you don’t want to try and talk to anyone making 75k or more.
All research is only going to be as good as your sample.
Your cheapest route is still gonna be turk, especially if you do most of the work, survey making and yadda. These guys are gonna be the next step up, and offering you the demo targeting piece to an extent.
Larger research firms, bigger companies are gonna have issues with no knowing enough about the “instantcashrewards” people. And i bet those folks are also turks. Until that pool of people gets legit cred larger research firms and bigger biz isnt gonna go here.
But i dont think thats thier niche really. Its the smaller biz, startup, mom and pop sorta market focus and thats especially nice at the $30 price point vs say an MarketTools survey with recruiting at $2000 quite a bit different.
But here’s the rub- what’s stopping another player on the scene making the same relationship with “instantcashrewards” people? If these guys have the exclusive connection- thats pretty good, if not, they need to work on securing more pools of people and widen their overall demo reach to keep the competition at bay.
Doh nm, the sample comes from their sister site.. so not bad. Odds are no other players are gonna be able to tap that pool.
It would be useful to build trust and a base with a free option for 25 respondents are offering your first survey for free to test.
Hi Frederick,
We thought about that but while that may buy us a few new clients it may also ruin our respondents’ community… Imagine a lot of careless users opening accounts just to send their inappropriate or garbage questions to the panel. Of course panel users could report such surveys but it would still add a lot of headache to moderate the system on case by case bases.
Lev
Cool service
A close friend pointed me out to this new tool, and tested out one of the beta accounts while I was around. It became very clear that these kind of tools should not be used by people who are not experienced researchers.
Not only were some standard answer categories missing, such as ‘other’, while writing the survey, but the questions were also not formulated in a correct way, although these were not leading, which could be another problem with other potential users. However, this basically means that the results will – without doubt – be biased and completely useless.
I am also wondering how you can ensure the quality of data? How can control procedures be implemented, such as red herrings, when the user is responsible for writing the survey himself? So many questions are coming to my mind!
But the scary thing is that the majority of people, who are using these free survey development tools, are not realising this…
I tried the AskYourTargetMarket beta and love the app. It’s very nicely designed, especially the targeting part, and easy to use. 50 answers may not be enough to get valid survey results, but AYTM has made self-service online market research affordable and fun. But they may not be the “first affordable self-service market research tool.”
Socialfire.com, a new service from FamilyLink.com has been offering affordable self-service online surveys since September 7th.
We currently offer 1,000 responses for $50. Our panel isn’t paid to answer questions. Our panel comes from the 20MM Monthly Active Users of our popular Facebook application.