Kyle
An interesting new startup in Paris is dealing with the realization that surveys are no fun anymore. Startups like Seattle’s PlayMySurvey are the exception not the rule. Paris startup HeyCrowd is all about polling rather than surveying.
This cool new platform allows users to set up their own polls about whatever they like and then poll the crowd. They can participate as well. Users can also participate in any of the other users polls, and then after they vote they can see where they stack up to the rest of the crowd.
HeyCrowd has positioned their platform and mobile app as “the addictive question game” gamifying the polling process rather than making it a long, lengthy list of questions. It could be looked at as a distant cousin to Quora but the questions are meant to be voting/polling type questions rather than long drawn out, ask and answer questions.
When you go to the heycrowd website or download the mobile app, the service keeps asking you questions that originated from the user base. The questions could go on forever if you’d like. HeyCrowd’s website says there are over 41,000 active questions. You can stay at the top of the page and let the questions keep moving up or you can sneak down to the questions you want to answer. You can answer as many or as few as you would like.
You can also ask whatever questions you would like and give multiple choice answers. Your question immediately goes into the rotation.
So far the questions seem playful enough. Once you answer a question it shows you in a graph how the rest of the user base answered.
We got a chance to interview Matthieu Rouif, co-founder of HeyCrowd. Check out the interview below:
What is HeyCrowd?
HeyCrowd is a mobile application and website where you can poll the crowd, vote on an endless stream of questions and discover what people think. It started from the simple idea that people love to read articles about statistics and they love to give their opinion, in other words poll are actually fun however, today, answering a survey is really dull
In layman’s terms, how does it work?
HeyCrowd website and mobile app propose a stream of questions in which you can compare yourself to the population by voting. Once you have voted, you can see the statistics of the rest of the people. All these questions are user generated so you can also ask questions about your hobbies or random topics on HeyCrowd, it is super simple.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Both founders Emmanuel Bellity and Matthieu Rouif have a strong background in engineering and statistics. They are both super curious and love beautiful products. When you start using HeyCrowd you will see that these qualities are also part of HeyCrowd. After graduating from college in French engineering school, both Emmanuel and Matthieu attended Master of Science in the U.S respectively at Columbia and Stanford. After a short professional experience, they started HeyCrowd.
Where are you based?
HeyCrowd HQ is based in Paris but being a small team we are quite mobile, sometimes working remotely from the US or even Brazil.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
Paris is becoming one of the best scene of Europe. Obviously it is still far from the Valley, but the talent pool is big, the money is also her. And the culture is becoming more and more entrepreneurial friendly as some success stories are getting more frequent. –
How did you come up with the idea for HeyCrowd?
Emmanuel is fond of statistics and polls. He noticed that people love to read statistics in the news, they even love to give their opinion and debate but they hate to take surveys. So he decided to create a new way to make people answer polls that would be user friendly and addictive.
How did you come up with the name?
The start up is really about creating a way for person to communicate with a crowd as a whole. When you ask a question to the people you want to say to them, “hey people”, “hey crowd!”, it conveys the idea that you interact with a crowd.
What problem does HeyCrowd solve?
For people asking a question, HeyCrowd is the only way to create a poll that is not going to be answered by your friends only, that is a big problem if you want to create a quick survey that is not totally biased. People answering, on the other hand, really see HeyCrowd as an addictive game.
What’s your secret sauce?
A lot of empathy towards our users (they always ask questions about HeyCrowd on HeyCrowd and we listen to them). Hardworking but doing something we love. Developing HeyCrowd product, if we starting answering 100 questions forgetting what was the bug we were looking for, we are on the right track.
What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?
As we are a mobile first start up, we launched with an iPhone version of HeyCrowd. A lot of people have androids and wanted to have the HeyCrowd app on Android. It was a real dilemma because having to maintain to apps on both platform would take longer, so to remain agile HeyCrowd chose to keep only the iPhone version for now.
What’s next for HeyCrowd?
We are developing a product for professional to get more insight out of polls and surveys. Besides, the consumer part is definitely getting more social but that is a surprise.
Linkage:
Go try HeyCrowd for yourself, but be careful it’s addicting
Download it for your iOS device here
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