SurveyMonkey launches market research product in Australia

SurveyMonkey has released a new product in Australia, SurveyMonkey Audience, which will allow startups and companies to tap into the preferences and opinions of a number of Australian consumers.

The product has launched with the intent of giving companies and startups cheaper ways to access quality market research.

It’s the first market outside the US where the company has made the product available.

SurveyMonkey Audience general manager and vice president Brent Chudoba says before the launch of this product the only option to carry out such research was by going to a boutique research firm, or a large research firm and spend upwards of $20,000.

“What (research firms) can do, is they can provide excellent work and build a presentation that’s hundreds of slides and really help inform someone what a market looks like,” he says.

“Our goal is to provide 80% of that value, and do something that costs about 20% of the price, but our real goal is to do it in 20% of the time.”

For the past two months SurveyMonkey has been building up its respondent database using a unique recruitment model.

SurveyMonkey donates 50 cents to a partner charity selected by the respondent for every survey completed.

Chudoba says a charitable incentive eliminates any data quality problems that might arise when paying respondents.

The surveys can target based on anything the customers might need – where respondents live, their gender, age, all the key demographic variables, along with things like what smartphone they use and the industry in which they are employed.

Importantly, it gives companies and startups access to respondents that aren’t already customers.

SurveyMonkey Audience projects typically cost between $1000 and $6000, the price varies depending on things like the length of the survey and how hard it is to reach the specific demographic users target.

Chudoba, who joined SurveyMonkey as its twelfth employee (it now has 275 across the world), thinks the service will be particularly valuable for startups.

“If you’re a tech startup that’s a mobile application or gaming platform, you can say you’re going to be able to build something and see what 1000 or 2000 consumers think, what they’re habits are, what their preferences would be, how much they’re willing to pay, that kind of thing,” he says.

“If you’re going to publish data for investors or PR and you want to make a splash, having a big sample size is nice.

“But if you’re trying to do research, or do some product development, getting some responses from 50 people, reading what they write and maybe asking some open ended questions can be very valuable.”

This story originally appeared at StartupSmart.