Don’t Kill Your Budget Getting Survey Responses

As I was looking to start my software company in the automotive space I, like many, thought it would be great to go out and get lots of feedback from potential users. Unfortunately, this tends to be harder than you might expect. Sure, you can join social groups, post on Reddit, and grind it out to find some responders but most people decide this isn’t worth their time.

So what do you do? Well, it seems like a lot of times the answer is paid responses. Services like SurveyMonkey will allow you to choose certain demographics and then have those people respond to your survey at a per-answer rate.

Current Services Are Too Pricey

In my case, where I was working on a service initially to help people find car shows, the demographic selection made it extremely expensive. They essentially charge you more based on how specific you’d like to be. At the end of the day, it was going to be about $8.50 per response and their targeting wasn’t quite what I wanted.

I was brand new and wanted 50–60 survey responses but was not about to spend $500 for them (plus the flat $60 fee they charge). Anyone trying to bootstrap their company should be very wary of forking over that much cash that early. Especially given that most surveys early on end up being out of date very quickly as you change directions.

What Do You Do?

After thinking about this for a bit, I decided instead to head to Facebook to try my luck.

I tried car groups, pages, and anything I could find but the anti spam viewpoints make it very difficult to post anything even if it is relevant. I had even posted an article about car wrap prices in a conversation specifically about those and still gotten flack. The current customer views are very spam focused and so it’s important to be aware of that. The last thing you want to do is piss off a bunch of potential customers!

Finally, Another Option!

Instead, I landed on the idea to use the FB ads platform to promote a post about my survey. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a huge supporter of Facebook as a whole, but do believe this was a very effective way of getting cheap responses.

I used the FB ads platform to target my ideal survey audience, in a way that is much more sophisticated and robust than SurveyMonkey’s options. As you might imagine with FB pulling in billions in ad revenue, they’ve built out this feature pretty well. You can even try to find people more likely to click on the link — aka do the survey — than just like it.

Once I found my audience, I promoted the post and almost immediately started getting responses. The incredible thing was I was only paying about 1/10 of what I would have on SurveyMonkey. Sure, I had to send it out to way more people to actually get responses but that was quite cheap considering. Plus, I was able to include my company name and FB profile as part of the ad so it kind of doubled as regular advertising.

The End Results

In the end I was able to get about 72 responses in 3 days and paid less than $1.00 per response.

• These were highly targeted. I had an intro question to vet whether they fit in the category and 100% of them said yes.
• Almost all finished the full survey.
• I had great age, location, interests data provided after the fact by FB’s AD platform free.

The Lesson

While I hope this helps others trying to get cheap survey responses, the main takeaway here is that bootstrapping a company requires some innovation and thoughtful approaches. At the time I did this, $500 would have been significantly more money than I had spent on everything else combined and likely not that helpful.

These are the days of B2B SaaS and anywhere you look there will be a company looking to charge you enterprise rates to do something for you. Be VERY picky in how you spend your money, as many times there are easy workarounds.

Remember, people got along quite well even before SaaS exploded in the last decade.