TapResearch is a market research company technology company that connects surveys to over 100 million respondents through mobile apps and games. Helping brands or product owners to quickly understand the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of their target audience at a lower and cheaper price.
TapResearch’s survey networking app Audience Network works with tens of thousands of mobile apps, with tens of millions of people answering questions distributed by TapResearch every day. The company currently has a total of 20 employees and generates $1.5 million in monthly revenue.
In the interview below, Aaron Platshon, founder of TapResearch, will share his entrepreneurial process and hopefully inspire you.
Hello! Who are you? What business do you do?
I’m Aaron Platshon, co-founder and CEO of TapResearch, which has developed a technology that makes it easier and faster to use consumer insights to inform decisions.
The TapResearch platform consists of two main products – Sample and Insights.
Sample provides market researchers with the best way to access survey respondents, and Insights makes it fast and easy for any decision maker to go from a question to an answer to a decision in one seamless interface.
Both Sample and Insights are built on the Audience Network, a massive survey network that delivers surveys to hundreds of millions of people through mobile apps, with billions of people spending their time, money and attention on the app.
TapResearch delivers over 1 million surveys per month to hundreds of clients who rely on our data to make decisions and generate approximately $1.5 million in revenue.
What’s your background? How did you come up with the idea?
I went to college in Pennsylvania and after spending 4.5 years on the East Coast, I was ready to return to California.
After college, I was fortunate enough to join Tesla Motors as one of the first 40 employees and one of the first “corporate” employees hired. As an early employee of a rapidly expanding organization, the opportunities were plentiful (including the chance to work in product management, sales and marketing in the US and Europe), and the work allowed me to benefit from more contact with the organization. In short, I learned a lot in a very short period of time and got to play with interesting automotive projects and talent on a daily basis.
I jumped ship to Better Place, another startup related to electric vehicles, which unfortunately did not go well. So, two of my colleagues and I left Better Place to start our own first company, Wheelz, which is a car-sharing marketplace (it’s like the Airbnb of the automotive world).
At Wheelz, we encountered the frustrating experience of trying to do consumer research on how to create products based on the needs of car owners. After raising money from Zipcar and scaling throughout California, Wheelz was acquired by Turo.
That experience ultimately inspired us to create TapResearch, which makes it easy for anyone to make decisions based on insights from their target audience. The initial inspiration came from our co-founder and CTO, Kevin Chang, who had created, published, and successfully realized games in the past.
Kevin believed that mobile games would be a powerful channel to reach and engage millions of people – and we also believed that if we could reach people at scale, we could create a new category of insight products.
Share the product design and launch process
We founded TapResearch in August 2013 and raised $1 million in seed funding in September from angel investors – some of whom had already backed Wheelz before, and some of whom we knew from before.
We also partnered with a law firm because we knew it was important to have a strong legal foundation if we wanted to build a large company.
Next, we assembled a small team of a few software engineers and a designer and spent a few months building the first version of the product. We continued to improve the UX design, sought feedback from users in our target market, and quickly iterated on the product until we got the most valuable product and it did what it was supposed to do.
When we started building our feedback network (through partnerships with mobile app publishers) and selling Insights products to customers, we got good feedback. But soon realised we couldn’t deliver on the value proposition – i.e. the chicken or the egg first question!
We couldn’t reach enough respondents to deliver the research project in a reasonable amount of time, and we didn’t have enough surveys to generate meaningful revenue for the mobile publisher.
We focused all our attention on solving the chicken or the egg problem. The first problem to solve is figuring out how to access a large number of surveys. If we can do that, we have the opportunity to successfully build our feedback network.
We found that the traditional market research industry was in dire need of new ways to reach respondents, especially younger groups that are difficult to reach through traditional methods and are primarily clustered in mobile apps.
With this newfound solution, we set out to build our market research client list and expand our survey network.
Since launch, what has helped you attract and retain customers?
Our initial target customers were large market research industry players, and given their buying patterns, we used a direct outbound sales approach, which is the most effective customer acquisition strategy. These customers need precise targeting on a daily basis and typically buy from us through technology integration, spending in the high six figures per year.
In addition, we built a marketing website and some other promotional materials that we developed internally, but for quite some time we did little other than sell directly to the outside world.
Over time, we’ve become more self-service with our products and marketing, which has allowed us to take advantage of more customer acquisition channels and better serve our smaller customers.
How are you growing now? What are your plans for the future?
We’re doing better today than ever before! Revenues and gross margins are growing, we’re developing some really exciting new products, and we now have a team of 20 people and are looking to expand rapidly over the next few years.
Last June, we moved into a great office space, but had to close the office due to the outbreak and enforce a work from home policy in March.
Fortunately, we’re great at working remotely and are more productive than ever.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are just starting out?
In entrepreneurship, you can learn from others’ experiences and strategies, but don’t try to copy what works for others. You have to make your own decisions and make the right ones for your specific situation.
Startups can take a long time to grow and they require a great deal of courage and commitment.
Make sure that you and your partner are both missing roles. If the company can survive without its founders, then they shouldn’t be founders.
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