MobileBeat: Thumbspeak helps your company get feedback from people on the go

Thumbspeak is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards.

The first opinion network made for mobile phones, Thumbspeak gives companies and app developers a way to rapidly collect insights and feedback from their customers by asking them questions on their phones. The goal is to offer this type of service at a competitively low price.

Users who download the Thumbspeak mobile application are asked to answer quick questions on their iPhones (and soon other 3G phones), sent to them by companies. In exchange for their answers, they are eligible for all kinds of rewards. The questions are targeted at people based on their demographics and locations.

“Thumbspeak is able to gather feedback from traditionally difficult types of people who will just not take traditional online or offline surveys,” the company says, identifying men, professional women, business travelers and the affluent as members of this category.

To make its surveys less intrusive, the company always keeps them to less than 20 questions, and puts a dollar sign next to questions that could yield monetary rewards. The next release of the application will share and compare your answers with others.

The startup believes that, eventually, mobile application developers will drive millions of people to download the Thumbspeak application in order to share in the revenues generated by these companies, which in turn are willing to pay for more desirable audiences.

“We will charge businesses by the number of responses and value of the target,” says Founder Dean Wiltse. “For example, an 18 to 32-year-old with a college degree, smart phone and a job [who] travels on business once a month is worth more to target for an airline or hotel.”

The company says it plans to bring in $2 million in revenue in its first year and $8 million in its second. By year four, it expects to be pulling down $30 million.

In addition to adding sharing and comparing functionality, Thumbspeak will also be building on a feature that allows businesses to upload their customers to private groups so that they can compare the answers of current customers with non-customers. It will roll out to BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile phones soon too.

The company may compete with Greenfield Online, eRewards, Lightspeed Consumer Panel, Harris Survey, and other feedback panel-creation and market research firms.