Wufoo + Free Incentivization = Cheap, Effective User Surveys

I am chiming in on this Patrick recommendation. We use Formspring, but 6 of 1, half dozen the etc. Surveys have been extremely useful to us.

Particular for businesses that sell products to other businesses, here's what we've found about doing surveys:

* It's easy to drive people to surveys using Twitter.

* They're a fast way to build an opt-in list of people to contact in the future.

* Just asking questions about the problems you address raises awareness and generates leads; for us, more effectively than advertising.

* Most of your assumptions are broken.

* If you're smart, you can build surveys that will generate newsworthy results; survey stories are layups for trade reporters.

We've had a lot of luck incentivizing survey respondants with posters and refrigerator magnets. We're happy to spread those around anyways. Now that we have a solid base of respondants, we're going to look to drive responses with less tangible payoffs. For instance, we'll extrapolate assertions about our industry off survey responses, publish them, embed them in the survey, and wait for nerds like us to come "correct" us.

The problem with me posting one of these things at 1:00 AM on a Sunday night and then talking to my family, taking a shower, and logging in to HN "one last time" prior to bed is that keeping up with comments from 3:36 AM is kind of difficult. Oh bother.

Well, I hope y'all like it. In particular skip down to the bit about information scarcity -- I think that one is broadly applicable to most of the businesses here. (Capsule summary: You can use something which you can create in abundance but which your users/customers perceive as scarce/valuable and trade it to them in return for things which have business value for you.)

Something several of my friends have recommended for me to try, is to artificially limit my already free product under the premise that people want more of what they can't have. In this article He goes from 15 to 20 bingo cards for free, which makes sense since the alternative is buying bingo cards. But has anyone seen anything like that work effectively for a product that only has one level (i.e. everything is free)?

Some suggestions i've gotten is to say users can generate 15 widgets per month, but can get unlimited if...they follow us on twitter, facebook friend us, email us to a friend...etc. At the end of the day has anyone seen a case where limiting a free and unlimited product actually increase the number of users?

I don't really understand the privacy part. You feel compelled to say it's anonymous, and then torture yourself over it.

I'd be perfectly fine with telling users "This survey will be linked to your account.", except that it sounds weird/unnecessary.

Paying customers don't generally expect/desire anonymity. Most probably want you to know their opinion.

A survey like this is little more than a predefined conversation between you and your customers. You're not anonymous in your regular communication (email/phone), so why would you be for the survey?

Perhaps not as polished as Wufoo, but Google Docs (Form) is great for creating user surveys and it's free.

It might be a little different than your use case, but Yongfook (another entrepreneur here in Japan) is working on a very nice-looking survey app called Seashell.

http://seashellapp.com/