He was employee #3 at Freshdesk. Now he steps off stealth to take on SurveyMonkey.

Photo credit: SurveySparrow.

Shihab Muhammed quit India’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) pioneer Zoho in October 2010, on the same day as Girish Mathrubootham did. Their simultaneous exit was just a coincidence. But when Mathrubootham learned that Muhammed was on his way out, he reached out. Two months later, Muhammed joined Mathrubootham and his co-founder Shan Krishnasamy to build customer support software Freshdesk. The product launched on June 10, 2011, got its first customer in four days, and Freshdesk went on to raise US$94 million in venture capital. Since then, it has grown into one of India’s best known SaaS successes, Freshworks.

Nine months ago, Muhammed – employee number 3 of Freshworks (better known as Freshdesk) – quit after diluting his shares during its series D and E rounds of funding from Capital G, Accel Partners, and Tiger Global. He has been on stealth mode since then, building an online survey tool that makes a questionnaire more conversational. The product under wraps so far, SurveySparrow, launched today.

“I used to dread the monthly employee satisfaction surveys. I used to fill them up grudgingly after multiple reminders from the HR despite knowing how important these surveys are to manage an organization well. But if any of my colleagues messaged me over WhatsApp or Google Hangout, I was always quick to answer all questions,” Muhammed explains what got him thinking about a tool to make surveys less of a chore. “Why can’t surveys be as simple and fun as chatting, I asked myself.”

Muhammed teamed up with his college-mate Subin Sebastian, another ex-Zoho engineer, to build SurveySparrow: “a conversational survey that I could attend with the comfort of my smartphone, when I was stuck in traffic or waiting in a line.”

SurveySparrow founders Shihab Muhammed (left) and Subin Sebastian. Photo credit: SurveySparrow.

See: SaaS superstar Girish Mathrubootham on ambitions, fears, and secret strategies

The survey jungle

Every company out there wants customer and employee feedback, so the survey market is huge. SurveySparrow will have to fight a few giants to find a footing.

Like SurveyMonkey, for example. The 17-year-old company has raised US$1.15 billion in funding and claims to handle over 3 million survey responses every day.

“We make the experience more chat-like and conversational with higher survey completion rates at SurveySparrow,” claims Muhammed. According to SurveyGizmo, internal surveys will have a 30 to 40 percent response rate on average, while external surveys clock 10 to 15 percent.

Qualtrics is another big player valued at US$2.5 billion, with a warchest of around US$180 million raised in April. The company is “on track to do more than US$250 million in revenue” and profitable, according to founder and CEO Ryan Smith. “We just refuse to not be cashflow positive,” he told Fortune recently.