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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The Pitch
UserMojo eyeing growth of instant web feedback business
By Lynette F. Cornell
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UserMojo (project of Progress Innovation Inc.)
Headquarters: Cambridge
Phone: 774-261-0341
Email: stephen@usermojo.com
URL: www.usermojo.com
Founders: Stephen Sprinkle and Adam Raczowski
Year founded: 2008
Employees: 2
In the company's own words:
“UserMojo is an emotion analytics platform that measures the quality of a site’s user experience. The way we do this is through a combination of observed and collected feedback. By observing the behaviors of users and engaging them directly, we are able to provide clear and actionable insights into why users do what they do.”
The background:
The founders met in college at a barbeque party and began chatting about a project, called Demoing, that CEO Stephen Sprinkle had been working on for a few months. In February 2008, they incorporated Progress Innovation, but by the time Sprinkle graduated in 2008, their product was not developed enough to be commercialized. Sprinkle accepted a position as the director of ecommerce for Diet Health Inc. Finding little time to develop his company while working full-time, Sprinkle left Diet Health in November of 2008 to resume work part-time on Demoing. Meanwhile, Raczkowski became a lead developer at TuftsLife.com but has since moved to work at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., while moonlighting at UserMojo as the CTO. After meeting with Shawn Broderick, TechStars executive director, the company was chosen to be one of the 10 companies to participate in the 2010 TechStars Boston startup incubator program.
About the technology:
“What we’re essentially doing is creating a way to measure user experience, answer ‘why’ users are doing what they do on your site and making these insights statistically relevant to your overall userbase. By doing this, you don’t just get insights from a small subsegment of your users, but you can deeply understand your user base as a whole. These insights go deeper than just the page level. They are tied to both the page level and the element level, so you get very granular insights. We run on Ruby on Rails and JavaScript and leverage proprietary algorithms to generate what we call a mojo score (not publicly deployed yet).”
How it works:
Basically, the technology allows users of a website to give instant feedback about how a specific part of that site, such as text, price or photo, made them feel. For example, if the product description on an e-commerce site was confusing, the user could mark it as such using the Feedback tab on the side or bottom of the page. Clicking on the tab launches the feedback tool as an overlay in the broswer window, which allows the consumer to give live feedback without interrupting their navigation on the site. The observational feedback aspect of the platform is still in development.
The plan:
They are ultimately planning to target all sizes of businesses, including both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. For the alpha and part of the beta phase, they are focusing more on small/medium and medium markets. Sprinkle said they chose those sites due to the highly interactive nature of their sites and how closely tied their interaction is toward conversion. They are working with 30 companies in an alpha phase, but the platform is open for anyone to use.
The pitch:
They are seeking $300,000, which they would use for marketing and team expansion.
The market:
According to Sprinkle, the market user analyitcs in e-commerce is currently $1 billion and growing to $4 billion by 2014.
"The Pitch" takes a look at a company, its executives and its technology-related business plan. To nominate your company for The Pitch section of Mass High Tech, please fill out the submission form.
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