Before the Polls Platform, we built a small application called Polls for iMessage. The application is very simple. It's a plugin for iMessage that lets you send a poll to your friends, so you can vote on things like where to go for lunch.
Turns out, people love polls, and our application is now the #1 Polls app. We are the #1 rated app in the Utilities cateogry on the App Store, And the #2 rated app across all _categories_ in the iMessage App Store.
The Data
Over 100k polls are sent on our platform every month, and the data tells a clear story. People are polling content from other sites. They are copying and pasting links from platforms like Yelp and OpenTable to decide where to go for lunch. Or they are copying links from Airbnb to decide which house to book.
Our Vision
Our vision is to add polls to every platform. So users on Yelp, OpenTable, or Airbnb can add their favorites to a poll and send it to their friends so everyone can vote.
We know users want to do this, because they're already doing this manually through our app. And now we can make it so much easier for them.
And for businesses, we can bring the power of polls to their platform.
Organic Growth
9 out of 10 companies we talk to in the US are using a referral program, for example if you get your friend to sign up, you each get $30 credit towards your purchases in the app. But these referral programs are extremely difficult to create. You have to build all these features to promote the program, handle the share codes and track the sign ups, it takes a significant investment from the engineering team. On top of that, you have to pay the $60 per sign up.
But even though it's difficult to do, all these companies are doing it because they know that word of mouth growth is so powerful, it's how all the best companies have grown. When your friends send you something, you trust them a thousand times more than you trust an ad.
So it works, and it creates this growth engine where your users are getting you more users and it just keeps going
Just like a referral program, what we are doing with polls drives organic growth by getting your users to share your app to their friends, but it doesn't require all the engineering effort or cost of a referral program.