What do the customers want? Will they buy your new product? How much are they willing to pay for certain services? Well these questions can only be answered by an effective survey.
What is a survey? Let’s just say that it is the answer bank to all the riddles you are faced with when it comes to consumer behavior. Businesses across all industries conduct surveys to uncover answers to specific and important questions. Unfortunately one of the most powerful tools is still conducted in a primitive manner. Remember that only 7% of communication is held in the words we speak or in this case type. The other 93% are held in facial expression, tone of voice and gestures. Yet so many business decisions are based on this 7% of written feedback.
Well to revolutionize the way you conduct surveys, we introduce you to Verbate.co. This tool helps you get video feedback from your customer and helps you unlock the other 93% in the simplest, scalable and data rich way.
Meet The Founder!
Ideated and founded by Matt Barnett, Verbate.co is here to change the way surveys are conducted.
Matt along with two other founders originally started with the idea of “family stories” on video. This venture was named Vimily. At the beginning of 2014 the second founder left Australia to move back to Europe, and with this move, they pivoted the business into a B2B offering – Video surveys i.e. Survey monkey with video if you like.
The pivot arose due to significant challenges in the consumer market coupled with significant interest from the B2B market.
“Our hero lead developer (mitch) stepped up to fill the CTO role, and following a tough year with some downsizing, we’re now back into growth, break even, and expanding the team. Currently with 3 full timers, we’re bringing on a production guy and currently looking for a full time marketing gem”, says Matt.
Know Verbate.co Better!
Think survey monkey but video. Surveys are awesome for research, feedback and ideas but they only capture one side of the coin – quantitative data. Verbate.co lets teams start to capture far more engaging, emotive and visual data in the form of video from customers. These include, unboxing video, reviews, brand feedback and even people going shopping on camera.
Matt only uses mobile video, as the quality and utility is so much better than desktop. The other cool thing about the app is that you can invite people to respond by SMS as well as email and social media thus ensuring quick and easy responses.
The Inspiration!
“We started with video interviews of family. As a filmer and photographer I knew how much more personal and engaging videos were as a storytelling tool than writing. With the advent and pick up of smartphone video, we knew this was the storytelling medium of the decade, and so we’ve been systematically bringing down the barriers to use, and the results are amazing”, says Matt.
Road Blocks & Contenders!
Since, the founders were seasoned entrepreneurs, running their own business’s wasn’t a challenge. So the stress and raising funds were not the worst. However, what did pose as a hurdle was getting the name of the product out in the market and finding early users as B2B takes a long time to build a decent client base.
In terms of competition, a number of existing research technologies enables video upload through specific apps or desktop video. These apps are complex, with high license fees, and hence are only used by experienced, funded teams & agencies who charge out services at a high fee. On the contrary, Verbate.co can be used in 3 minutes at an awesome price point by anyone with very little experience.
On Expansion Plans & Targeted Audience!
“We are already running projects overseas, but we’re focusing on building the team here in Sydney. In parallel we are bringing in some great technology to help decipher the world of visual research. We already transcribe out all Audio for search, and soon we’ll be making facial and even tonal analysis available to customers”, says Matt.
At the moment, Matt’s target audience is anyone who already uses surveys to help understand their team and customers. This could be, but is not limited to product managers, designers, HR managers, insights and brand teams, marketers and agencies.
Monetizing Model!
Presently, the team has two business models. First up would be projects wherein for some agencies and clients, the team will run complete research projects, resulting in beautiful montage video edits of insights. Secondly, they would also be relying on self serve subscription. There are a number of subscription plans available online.
In short, with Verbate.co you never have to send out boring surveys again to muster valuable suggestions and feedback from your clients!!
To know more details, do visit: www.verbate.co
