Wufoo's Secret to Customer Happiness? Googly Eyes | Hacker News Reader

Wufoo's Secret to Customer Happiness? Googly Eyes

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Wufoo makes such ridiculous gobs of money. People barely pay attention because they're located in Tampa and don't brag about it all the time - like other subscription based revenue companies we often hear from.

What's worth noting is if a big company (99% of them anyway) tried to copy off of WuFoo they'd seem so disingenuous and fake they'd fail. Unless your AMEX, of course.

Google has released Google Forms as part of their Apps For Your Domain offering. It feels very impersonal compared to Wufoo, of course, but let's not underestimate it.

Can you say how much money?

When they were just starting, I remember thinking, "How narrow and trivial. Do they honestly expect to make money?". I'm looking to make this lesson even more potent.

Seconded. We hear all kinds of things about how much companies exit for, but rarely about what they earn. Even an order-of-magnitude or a per-employee order-of-magnitude would be interesting.

This isn't meant to be an accurate analysis, but it gets halfway there. Have your grain of salt ready.

Wufoo has pretty standard conversion rates of 7% signup, 15% free -> paid. Each paid user nets about $13/mo. (http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/)

Compete (500k/mo | http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wufoo.com/) and Quantcast(250k/mo | http://www.quantcast.com/wufoo.com) have vastly different total traffic numbers, but Quantcast suggests that only 15% of their traffic are regular users.

MY GUESS: Their monthly active users are probably between 30k-75k. 30% of their active users are paid users. I'd say they make about 250k/mo.

This is an example of the difference between "Good" and "Great".

I have officially been brainwashed... was totally expecting a Google pun here.

Wufoo in general is a good simple success story. Its a story of polish. Polish in concept, site design, feature set, attention to detail, hand written thank you for using our service notes and more. They are a good envious benchmark for you want to be.

<Idea> why don't more companies have sit down and write a customer day </idea>

On a seemingly unrelated note, "Happiness is only real if shared." - Christopher McCandless

My first thought: "Hmm, I could outsource note-writing to India, or automate it with Mechanical Turk."

I suppose that defeats the point though. :)

How about timesvr?

Interesting. The real issue question may lurk here:

Did the developer do it because its in his job description or because he felt strongly that he wanted to communicate with the client in that way?

And how does that change things?

His self-description was not completely accurate. Chris Campbell is a co-founder of Wufoo.

You bring up a good point. Right now, we're still small so everyone has a support day and talks to users almost daily. At this size, we all appreciate the close communication with the people using our product and we write those cards out of free will (not just a job description). Chris wrote more about it here:

http://particletree.com/notebook/the-4-12-day-workweek/

Now, as the company grows, this may have to be adjusted. The cards did not start as some marketing stunt, and we never want that message to be sent to our users. When cards from developer X don't feel personal enough, we'll have to brainstorm some more creative ways to thank our users.

Fans of Googly Eyes may also enjoy this:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/googly_eyed_bill

Or maybe not, it's pretty silly. You can get the source code and make your own googly eyed people (PG, anyone?).

  the handwriting suggests that the author spends much
  more time with a keyboard than a pen.

Really? It looks rather neat to me. If that handwriting looks bad, the writer should visit my doctor sometime!

usually you need substance before form, but with Wufoo 'form' is substance; great business model.

Ok, Even tough Me was touched. Go Wufoo.

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