Do you want to know how many jellybeans are in a quart jar? Well, you can Google that (the answer is as many as 230). But what if you want the answer to something more subjective, like, “Security or privacy. Should the government have intrusive access into our lives or risk not stopping a terrorist act?” Well, according to the Zip Question and Answer App, the answer is privacy by 57% to 43%. In just over four months, there have been more than three million answers to Zip App questions, making it what founder Ric Militi calls “the Google of opinions.”
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The Zip App provides users with ability to ask questions and get answers from the entire Zip App community of tens of thousands of users. You ask the question, then give two possible answers. Because there are only two choices, you are limited in what you can ask, as well as how useful the answers might be. So for example, I could ask, “Would you rather have Donald Trump or Marco Rubio as the Republican presidential nominee?” But you cannot ask, “Who would you prefer, Trump, Rubio, or Cruz?” One day that may change, but for now it’s all two choices. Now, that wouldn’t prevent a researcher from coming up with some more detailed answers by asking a series of either/or questions.
For example, Zip App has some interesting predictions for Super Tuesday. Here are the results of their recent political questions about the GOP field:
According to Zip – The Question Answer App, US voters predict the following outcome on Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential race:
If Trump wins Super Tuesday on March 1, will his momentum get him the Republican nomination?
59% Yes, Trump 2016
41% It’s not enough
States: All 50 states
Cities: 908 cities
Average Age: 37
Who do you think will be the big winner on Super Tuesday?
74% Trump’s got it in the bag
26% I’m going Cruz
States: All 50 states
Cities: 406 cities
Average Age: 39
On Super Tuesday, who’s going to win big?
74% Trump will
26% Rubio, hands down
States: 49 states
Cities: 409 cities
Average Age: 39
Super Tuesday is almost here – who will be the big winner?
52% Cruz
48% Rubio
States: 49 states
Cities: 430 cities
Average Age: 39
ZIP PREDICTION: Trump will be the big winner on Super Tuesday. In addition, his momentum after Super Tuesday is likely to carry him through to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency barring any major, unforeseen announcements or blunders. It is a statistical dead heat between Cruz and Rubio for second, but the ranking does not matter because Trump will be the clear winner by a strong majority.
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CEO Ric Militi says the Zip App concept started with a squabble with Zip co-founder and Director of Brand Development Alanna Markey, but he says it wasn’t the kind of thing that could be settled with a Google search:
“We have a tech company and we’re actually working on a couple other solutions right now. One day at lunch, Alana and I got into a little bit of a squabble and I asked her to- we wanted to settle it. So we kind of did what everyone does when they get in a subjective argument… Well, there are some things you can’t Google. If it’s subjective, it’s difficult to Google. You can Google a fact. So, we weren’t arguing about what the highest mountain in the world was or something like that. We were arguing about something a little bit more subjective…. So it was more about the way people refer to something. I said, well why don’t you just download an app? It’s funny you said Google, by the way, because actually people are referring to us now as the Google of opinions… You couldn’t ask for a better moniker than that. So anyway, I said to her, why don’t we download an app that does that? She said, does what? I said, you know, an app I can just ask a question to, and put what we’re arguing about, the two different sides, and then everybody can vote on which side they agree with. And she said, I don’t know that an app like that exists. There’s just polling apps and there’s apps where you can set up surveys, but there’s not really one where we can shoot out one quick question and everybody just gets that question. I said, are you sure about that? That seems like something that should exist. So we had our research team at our company look into it and sure enough nothing existed. We thought, well, that’s a little weird. So we started getting into it and we developed, I mean it’s a lot deeper than that, but it’s a very simplistic app.”
Milliti says the average age at his tech company, Crazy Raccoons, is 20s or 30s, except for himself. He says,
“I’m the CEO and I’m 57. When we wrote Zip, we started writing it though my eyes, in the sense that I wanted it to be easy for someone of my generation to be able to download it, use it, and it be very intuitive, and if you did something wrong I wanted a pop-up screen that tells you what you did wrong to walk people through it who might not be as tech-savvy as 20-year-olds… I put a lot of emphasis on people of 45 plus being able to use our app with no problem. So that’s how the app developed. So then we started looking at some of the uses for that and all of a sudden it became much bigger. We started thinking, this has a tremendous media skew to it, it has a tremendous research skew to it, the data collection is phenomenal. And so we built a very simplistic app. Once you download it, you basically have two choices… You have the choice to answer questions, or to ask a question. It’s that simple. What makes it so unique is that- Survey Monkey or Twitter polling or anything like that don’t compare to what we do because, first of all, Twitter polling only polls the people that are your friends… So even if you are a massive celebrity and you have millions of followers on Twitter, you’re going to be asking the question to people that are already like-minded to you, that are following you, that have a reason to connect with you. Our app is completely and 100% anonymous. So anybody who writes a question or asks a question, there is complete anonymity. That plays a tremendous role in the honesty of what’s going on within our platform. The other part that’s really interesting is that it’s basically designed to be binary. So basically, most arguments, or most questions, are between two things. Do you like this, or that? Do you feel this way, or that way?”
We asked him about how the Zip App deals with those questions that simply cannot be made into “either/or:”
“What we do is we bracket. So we ask various questions- well, we don’t ask them… All of the content in our app is by the users. So some people ask, who would you rather vote for, Trump or Rubio? Some people would say, who would you rather vote for, Trump or Cruz? Trump or Kasich? And it went on and on and on, and we started collecting that data and through our abilities, we’re able to really start making some very, very strong assumptions, which is why we’ve predicted every primary or caucus accurately to this point. We haven’t missed one yet. Because we get this tremendous amount of data- Most polls are going out and they’re doing intercepts or they’re doing phone calling or things like that and they’re collecting data that way, which is such an arduous process. Ours is all organic because it’s all Americans talking to Americans anonymously, asking questions about everything from politics to religion to dating to sports to business questions, every category. We’re getting so much data, where as one of those polls that you’re seeing predictions on, it would be my guess is 400 samples, which leaves you a 5% plus or minus accuracy on the assumption. We’re getting, in some of our questions, 1000-1500 responses, which is tremendous, and we’re getting them over and over and over again, which substantiates the poll that we’re getting, or the questions that are being asked.”
After only 4 ½ months, Militi says the Zip App is doing better than Twitter did at the same point in its infancy, averaging about 118,000 engagements a day. Alana Markey says one of its attractions is anonymity:
“Where we’re getting a lot of traction versus something like a Twitter poll is because it is anonymous. People feel comfortable both asking and answering questions honestly. They’re not really filtering their responses, which is giving us some interesting results when we look at things like political. It’s also giving people a forum that hasn’t existed so far to really get that anonymous feedback from other people and to also ask questions that they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking their peers or posting on social media associated with their name. They’re still getting consensus on those issues.”
The company has so much confidence in the uniqueness of its process that it has already done a provisional filing for a patent.
Markey says that, surprisingly, the users of Zip App are turning out to be older than predicted:
“The other thing is that, when we initially launched, we definitely anticipated having a younger audience, and our average age was actually significantly higher at launch. It was up more around 48. It was definitely higher and then the longer we’ve been out, the more we’ve seen some of the millennials start to adopt. But it was really fascinating for us that our earliest adopters were not in that millennial age bracket and they were people that typically would be hard to acquire and attain for an app like this.”
Militi says a number of commercial organizations, including iHeart Radio and Fox News, are already making use of the Zip Question and Answer platform for their own research. And as of now, you can add Tech50+ to that list. Look for regular results to our questions on our home page.
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