Emmanuel Bellity ’08GSAS started HeyCrowd with the idea that mobile would shake up the survey industry. Historically, surveys were traditionally conducted by way of paper questionnaires, land line phones or more recently, web surveys. With the explosion of smartphones, people can share their opinions through a much better mobile user experience.
HeyCrowd first product is a social voting app for iOS. It’s a fun community where people can ask questions to different groups (“crowds”) and vote on other people’s questions to compare themselves with others. It has attracted 500,000 users and more than 160 million votes have been made, being one of the biggest opinion graph in several countries (mainly US, France, UK, Germany and Brazil).
In December 2011, HeyCrowd won the silver award at LeWeb start-up competition and got seed funding from Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel, founder of Illiad-Free, co-owner of Le Monde) and Jacques-Antoine Granjon (founder & CEO of Ventes-Privées).
HeyCrowd second product is an online survey maker allowing businesses, students and other organizations to create more sophisticated web and mobile surveys. It’s an easy-to-use tool to make questionnaires and share them by email, social media or websites to collect responses and get access to an online visualization of the answers and statistics in real-time.
Marketing researchers who need more answers for their surveys can target a segment of HeyCrowd community to get access quickly to a sample that fits their market, at an affordable cost and without intermediaries.