Here’s a startup catered towards companies who need market research respondents: Referoll aims to be the platform to recruit these quickly and efficiently, and incentivize its users for participating.
The current website is pretty simple at the moment, but founder Ariff Munshi explains it is “only the start of what is to come”. The startup will be rolling out new features to the site, such as algorithms to recommend projects, pre-filtering of respondents, targeted notifications and respondent-project matching. At present, it has included a screening process before participants are allowed to take part in the project. I guess this filters out serial and under-qualified survey respondents, ensuring a quality pool for the companies using Referoll, which I am sure participating companies will appreciate. The startup currently has on board companies such as National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star).
Signing up for a Referoll account was so easy. All I needed to do was to log in via Facebook (see picture below), and there, a Referoll account. I then chose a project to participate, received an immediate email confirmation, and meanwhile, was subjected to the screening process. Within ten minutes, I received a call from Ariff asking why I participated in one of its projects. I basically got screened by the team at Referoll and was, sadly, rejected. But well, I needed to try Referoll before being able to write about it! Also, I thought it would be great if there are other methods of signing up instead of just purely Facebook login, so the startup can capture a wider pool of respondents.
Ariff, an NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) alumni[1], saw the opportunity when he was a respondent himself. He elaborates:
Like most students, I was always looking for money to fund myself so I was taking part in experiments and research projects. It was when I was approached by a recruiter for a market research project, I realised there was an opportunity to revolutionize this model — the recruitment methods as well as the process flow could be greatly improved.
I knew I could perform a more efficient job than current recruiters in the market. Having being a respondent myself, I knew there was also an opportunity to monetize. I did my due diligence and researched, having to find out the only way to spread the word in the industry was posting in forums. Some research companies do post in the papers too, and this is especially so for the medical research companies.
Referoll first started last September with the name Lobangz.com (FYI, lobang is a Singaporean term for deals and bargains), and adopted the group buying model. Instead of featuring deals, they featured projects for participants to earn money. Referoll was also one of the finalists for both Startup@Singapore 2011 and Singapore Management University (SMU) Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) Business Plan Competition 2011, where they obtained valuable feedback and were then able to validate their idea.
The Referoll team previously received SPRING Singapore YES! funding of S$25,000. It also has another NOC alumni, Alvin Tang, to take charge of business development and another four people on their technical team.
Their future plans? Ariff jokes (but he’s serious about the latter statement):
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