Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 6)

Sramana: The survey market is quite full, and SurveyMonkey is a dominant player in the market. How did you compete against them?

Aydin Mirzaee: In the beginning we were focusing on the Canadian market. We met governmental regulations that gave us a niche market. Once we had that funding, we started to focus on expanding our feature sets to including things our competitors did not have. A generic tool will serve 80% of the market. We looked at the really expensive tools out there which were enterprise appliances and examined the features they had that online tools did not have. We applied all of those features with ease of use features.

Sramana: Could you give me an example of that type of feature?

Aydin Mirzaee: One basic example is that we can do fancier branching and skipping within a survey. If Question A equals a certain answer and Question B on a different page equals a certain answer, then show the user Question C. We can build all sorts of trees like that which could be based on the country a user is in or any other number of factors. We have a lot of branching and skipping logic. The simple tools are not very robust in those areas. If you go to FluidSurveys.com today and scroll through our feature list, you will see it is ridiculous in what it offers.

Sramana: Once you started to find traction with your tool set, it sounds like you went for heavy-duty features at an affordable price. Is that fair?

Aydin Mirzaee: Yes, with a strong emphasis on usability. People did not expect enterprise software to be easy to use.

Sramana: Who in your target audience was interested in your enterprise heavy-duty features?

Aydin Mirzaee: We had demand from all sorts of users. Almost every organization in the world can make use of survey software. Initially there were a lot of academics who wanted to do surveys. Then we got a lot of users at larger companies who were using do it yourself software and had some more advanced needs. We had developers and marketing professionals using our software to get feedback.

Once we started doing well with FluidSurveys, we decided to start working on ReviewRoom again. This was in 2010. We initially went back to try and sell to business plan competitions. We quickly realized that aside from a few major competitions there was not much of a market there. We then realized that the process of people applying online, and having other people evaluate and make decisions based on that application, applies to a ton of different things.

We started seeing colleges and universities as well as government associations, basically anyone who wanted to give out awards, start to use ReviewRoom. In 2012 more than $500 million was given out using ReviewRoom as a platform. Today Fluidware has both FluidSurveys and ReviewRoom as products. We got here in a completely random path.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
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