Quizbert: What can I do better?

You should modify the app so it can generate sales leads and then charge companies to use it for their own lead generation campaigns. Have you read the book Ask by Ryan Levesque? If not, you should read it immediately.

Hi Martin,

Looks like we're in kinda the same market.

I've been having a similar side-project since 2011. I'm not targeting the "learning for myself-quizzes"-market. But some of my users are using my product for this, none of these are paying tough since I only charge when making a quiz public.

Here are a few advices based on my experiences;

1. Do not offer a free plan. It will lead to spam/low quality/NSFW-quizzes being created that will get you into trouble if you run ads on the free quizzes. I "solved" this by charging $5/year for the "for fun-quizzes" to be made public. It might work if you target the "learning for myself"-niche tough.

2. A market for business to create a quiz to drive visitors/customers exists, however, few business do this on a regular basic, so a recurring revenue is hard to sustain due to churn. When you find the right customer it does not matter if you charge $25 or $250, they will happily pay anyway, but usually not willing to commit to a monthly subscription.

3. It's hard to go after the "for fun-market" and the "business-market" at the same time. Previously I did this on 2 different domains/sites, but merged them together to see if this could lead to SEO-benefits. I'm currently considering separating them again since business customers tends to get scared when they land on a "for-fun-quizzes-website". I've seen less big-name customers since the merge.

4. The word "Quiz" means a lot of different things to individuals, customers have a lot of different feature requests. I think it's important to decide who you are building this for and what that customer are using your product for. Otherwise your product will get bloated really fast. One example is that I've had requests from marketing people trying to do offline events (think Ipad in their booth at an event) and customers wanting to send out a quiz to their employees in their newsletter. It's very hard to satisfy both customers and still keep the product simple to use.

I think finishing a web app is a great step forward, and the skills learned during that time are definitely not a waste of any kind no matter what. :)

That being said, I think you have already hit on some important concerns above:

1. I personally have used a couple quiz builders, and they are awesome and super built out already. In this case, I 100% think there are already too many quiz web apps out there basically for exactly what you're doing -- fun or exam prep. Quizlet, among many others, has done this very thing well for a long time.

2. YES, SPECIALIZE INTO A NICHE... IF you want to keep building this out with any hope of a user base. I'd be thinking "How could I turn this into a b2b SaaS of some kind?" Because if I learned anything while building getrocketnote.com, it's that students are not going to be paying often at all. :P And I think "make quizzes for fun" people will pay even less often. I'd either target teachers wanting to do practice tests online (not sure of market for this), or somehow target business owners and institutions like Qualtrics' market (sold for 8 billion to SAP). I just don't think you can make real money with just another quiz app unless you happen to be the world's best marketer along with being a dev. :P

It's cool to be building stuff and actually seeing it through to a functional web app for sure, and for that I applaud you friend. It seems like this time around you built it just for the sake of building it. Not as much with a specific problem you were solving in mind that hadn't already been solved well.

My frank advice at the end of the day is that I think you should use what you've learned and go build something that has a market willing to receive a new solution. You can do it! Best of luck to you, man!