What is Qzzr? A) A sleek, online quiz tool. B) A startup that drives social traffic, captures leads, presents offers, and tracks scores. C) A company with clients like ESPN, CBS, Mashable, IBM, Yahoo!, Reddit, Yelp and KSL. D) A business run by serial (and seriously stellar) entrepreneurs. E) All of the above. The answer? E. (Duh.) But at BusinessQ, we don’t write quizzes for a living. We just ask entrepreneurs the tough questions — and let the quotes roll. Like this one: “The traction and leads our customers have seen are the most fun,” says Qzzr founder Josh Little. “We’re shaking our heads in amazement. I know we should be saying, ‘Yeah, we absolutely knew this would happen.’ But holy cow. Seven thousand leads from one quiz? That’s crazy.” Just crazy enough to work.
Bucky Flowers and I got together to start Movement — a venture studio where we’d get a team of rock star people together and build anything we wanted to. We started with a list of a hundred ideas, from restaurants to software products. We worked through four or five ideas, killed a couple of them and then ranked the remaining.
Then the Qzzr idea came. Basically, it’s a super simple, beautiful quiz tool where anyone can create a quiz and share it on social media — and then track the results of that quiz. We originally started creating them for the education space — an obvious fit there — but what we’ve found is that most of the people using Qzzr are marketers and publishers trying to drive traffic to their websites. From BuzzFeed to the New York Times, quizzes are the most shared articles right now. The world wants to be quizzed! It’s a quiz renaissance.
Qzzr has become an emerging opportunity — so much so that we’ve moved away from the list of other ideas and are focusing all our efforts on this. When we started to focus on the publishing/marketing space, we started flying. I can’t begin to describe the impact that change has made for us.
We’ve had more than 15,000 quizzes made on Qzzr since the end of March. We’re clocking 100 new accounts a day. And several million people have taken our quizzes. We’re like … woah.
But the better story is what’s happening with our customers. Clients who are posting these quizzes are not only driving traffic to their sites, some are getting social lift of 750X (meaning for every 100 people who see it, it’s taken 75,000 times). BuzzFeed isn’t even getting those numbers.
Even more exciting are the leads companies are capturing. Whether a company wants visitors to download a free eBook, sign-up for a weekly newsletter or make any call to action, we’ve seen an average 7 percent lead conversion rate across thousands of quizzes. If your content is excellent, we’re seeing 10 to 20 percent conversion rates. And for targeted offers at the end of quizzes — like 15 percent off a swimsuit — we’re seeing 13 percent conversion rates on average. For the web? That’s cah-razy.
These are all early numbers. We’re in chapter two of writing this book. We’re growing the team, scaling the product and raising a round of financing. But man. We feel like we’ve found something. To see ESPN and Yahoo! use our product — and to have them see tremendous success with it — is a cool feeling. It validates what we’re doing.
I’ve launched products in the past — and it’s been crickets. But with Qzzr it’s like we’re on a wild fishing trip and all the poles have fish. We don’t sleep. We’re constantly watching real-time traffic stats like a bunch of nerds. The energy is fun. It’s still a little like Moby Dick around here.
We worked for the first five months in the room above my garage. There were five of us working in that room, and it smelled like men up there. Truthfully, it still kind of does.
Our name was a five-minute decision. It just happened. We had it longer — QUIZZER — but then we found a four-letter domain, bought it for $12, and that was it. Actually, the truth is that we just generally hate vowels.
It’s highly unlikely we’ll be running the company in five years. I don’t know if that’s the politically correct answer — or what you want to hear. But my guess is we’ll be acquired by someone like Google, Salesforce or Survey Monkey. My last company was acquired in18 months.
Right now we’re leading the company into new territories. We’re bridging the gap. In the beginning we saw ourselves as a ubiquitous quiz tool. But it’s gone beyond that. We’re delivering a product to our customers that is adding revenue streams.
We might look like a bunch of goofballs, but everyone here is at the top of their game. We’ve run businesses and worked at Fortune 500 companies. I’d rather have a team of 12 at the top of their game, than a team of 50 you have to manage and wipe noses. We still only have eight full-time people right now. We have some contractors and some partnerships, but we look a lot larger than we are. That’s what happens when you work with people at the top of their game. They deliver massive results.
Bucky and I aren’t cutting our hair until the company is profitable. I just hope my beard doesn’t hit my belly button — that would be an outward manifestation of how much I’m sucking as an entrepreneur.
We worked in a room above my garage. There were five of us … and it smelled like men up there.