Survs

We’ve made some improvements to the “Email invite” channel, allowing you to further personalize your survey invitation emails and to prevent mistakes in the email message.

From now on you can:

• Automatically include your respondents’ first and last name, as well as the content of the notes field in your emails.
• Preview the messages before sending them, in order to be able to correct eventual mistakes before sending the emails out to your recipients.

What do you think about these changes? We’re counting on your feedback to continually improve your favorite survey tool :-).

We’ve just added 5 new survey templates in English to Survs:

• Event Planning Survey
• Fundraising Survey
• Course Evaluation Survey
• Service Pricing Survey
• Product Pricing Survey

Stay tuned, as we’ll add these surveys in other languages in the next weeks. And don’t forget that you can also share your survey templates with the rest of Survs users!

Enough Pepper is happy to announce that it has added Survs to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services.

Some time ago we were surprised by an invitation from the Google Apps™ team to be one of 50 Google Apps Marketplace™ launch companies. We have spent the last months working hard and in close cooperation with Google, in order guarantee the integration and it is with great joy, so it is with great joy that we today announce the official launch.

Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services.

Survs is now integrated with Google Apps, allowing not only the access to the application using Google Apps Single Sign-On, but also to export survey results into a Google Spreadsheet. After installing Survs on your Google Apps account, you can access it using the same links you use to navigate the Google Apps suite.

If you’re a Google Apps user and want to integrate Survs on your domain, just follow these instructions.

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

Survs has a lot of users who work in the user experience design field, so we decided to offer them a little gift… How about 10% off the price of a conference for user experience professionals, with a fabulous set of world renowned speakers (Jared Spool, Steve Krug, Peter Merholz…)?

We’re sponsoring the User Experience Lisbon, taking place in Lisbon between the 12th and 14th of May, and would love to meet some of our users there. Just use the code SURVS2010 when signing up for the conference and you’re done!

See you all in Lisbon :-).

We’ve made a partnership with our good friends of myGengo, a great online translation service located in Japan. They have been using Survs for some time, and we thought it was a good idea to collaborate on the translation of our survey and language templates.

For starters, they have translated Survs’s templates to five new languages: Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Italian. myGengo also provided us with two new language templates: Russian and Japanese.

Just log in to your account, click the New Survey tab and pick the language of your choice :-).

We’ve been working on some of Survs’s templates to help our users to start from a solid basis. Until now we’ve released five templates:

• Customer Satisfaction Survey (Service)
• Customer Satisfaction Survey (Product)
• Event Evaluation Survey
• Employee Satisfaction Survey
• Web application survey

These templates will soon be included into the Create survey page. Meanwhile, you can import them to your accounts. Just click the above links and choose the account you want to import the templates to. It’s as easy as that.

If you want, feel free to translate the templates to your language and share them with other users. Survs is all about building things together and sharing knowledge :-).

Some of you have complained about the length of Survs’s survey and template URLs, so we decided to make them shorter!

Here is an example:

http://www.survs.com/template/96OVM5WF

But it gets even better, you can drop the www and use only:

http://survs.com/template/96OVM5WF

Now it’s much easier to copy and paste them to wherever you want :-).

After our public launch, we offered one month of the Premium plan to all beta users. This period will end on the 22nd of October. On that day, all beta accounts will be downgraded automatically to the Free plan unless you take action and choose otherwise. If you wish to keep your Premium plan or choose another subscription plan, you can do so by going to your Account page and clicking the “Change plan” link.

Even if you are downgraded to the Free plan, you’ll still have access to all your survey responses and you can upgrade your account at any time. There are no strings attached!

A special thanks to our beta users for helping us build Survs. It wouldn’t be possible without you :-).

Yes, the big day has come: today, we’re officially launching Survs!

And what’s the best way to celebrate this day? Reveal the secret sauce :-).

The goal

It all started with a dream of an experienced and passionate team who wanted to simplify the way people did surveys online… We rolled up our sleeves and started to work having one goal in mind: build an online survey tool that got things done while providing a great user experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

How we did it?

By involving users in the design process from the first sketches to the “final” product, practicing what we like to call collaborative design. Most of all, we know how important it is to listen and engage in conversations with the users.

So, you see, there is no big secret in making an online survey tool like Survs , it’s all about you :-).

The result?

Survs has a powerful set of features, which are carefully designed so the advanced features won’t get in your way when you don’t need them . Everyone can start playing with the basics and then slowly discover everything else that can be done with Survs.

And again our users helped us – people quickly understood our approach and the word spread out like fire:

• “If anyone needs to make a survey for any reason at all, YOU MUST try Survs!” Matthew Smith – Squared Eye
• “We have been using Survs for several months now and are delighted with its superb usability and features.” John Henry – JustGiving
• “Survs is to online surveys as Gmail is to web-based email. Seriously good!” Eric Stoller
• “Survs is an amazing online survey tool. I reviewed it a couple of weeks ago along with Google docs and SurveyMonkey and it absolutely nailed the competition” Paul Seys – Redweb

Besides a press release, until today we haven’t spent a single dollar on marketing. If we are writing this post today it’s because of our users. One by one, people started to talk about Survs and when we least expected Survs was on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and being considered the best online survey tool by the .net magazine!

This is only the beginning…

It’s never too much to thank you all. Without your help, building and promoting Survs wouldn’t have been possible. But we’re only warming up…

And don’t worry, we’re not going to bloat Survs with endless and meaningless features. instead we’ll focus on improving the features we have and slowly introduce more innovations to the online surveys world. As usual, we’re counting on your feedback :-).

Today we’re announcing a new pricing model based on our users’ feedback!

We also want to explain why we didn’t take some of your suggestions, so make sure you read until the end.

Plans

There will be a free plan with some feature limitations, whereas all paid plans are fully featured. The main differences are the number of users allowed in the account and the amount of responses per month.

Monthly plans

• The Free plan will allow 1 user and 200 (we doubled the number!) responses per survey.
• The Basic plan will cost $19/month, allow 2 users and 2,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.04 per response.
• The Pro plan will cost $39/month, allow 4 users and 4,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.03 per response.
• The Premium plan will cost $119/month, allow 24 users and 24,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.01 per response.

Yearly plans

We decided to offer annual subscriptions of our paid plans which will be to the benefit of our most active users. The features set and number of users allowed per account stay the same.

It works like this: if you sign for a one year subscription of one of our plans, you’ll only pay for 10 months. But that’s not all… All yearly subscriptions will allow unlimited responses!

Non-profit and academic institutions will have a 30% discount on both monthly and yearly plans.

Why doesn’t Survs have a “single survey option”?

Some of you asked for a “single survey option”, but we think our model already allows to do that. If you want to make only one survey you just have to subscribe for a month and and then downgrade to the free plan. All your data will still be available. There are no strings attached.

However, as we said about our roadmap, nothing is set in stone, and we may reconsider this in the future.

Why isn’t the response limit of the free plan isn’t higher?

We’ve listened to your arguments and decided to double the number of responses per survey! We think this is perfect for individual users and small businesses who just want to do a small survey.

This is not a closed process…

Probably we won’t make any significant changes to the pricing before the public launch, but we are always alert to what you have to say. So don’t hesitate to give us your opinion :-).