Poutsch is Quora for polls

If you want to set up an opinion poll on the Internet, there are plenty of options, from the venerable PollDaddy to hip upstarts like GoPollGo, but Poutsch is an interesting new player in the game that blends traditional polling with a Quora-style approach to collecting users’ questions and answers.

As with any other polling service, you set a question, choose some multiple choice answers and publish. Then, other users can vote to determine the most popular answer. However, Poutsch goes further by letting you search the site for questions asked in the past, users or for tags that users have given to their polls.

The result really is, essentially ‘Quora for polls’. Polls are publicly archived so you can explore them, and once you’ve answered any question, you can view the stats such as the geographic spread and gender split of respondents, plus details of how many people changed their mind during the life of the poll.

The Quora comparison only works up to a point though, while questions are organized in a similar way, Quora has a knack for surfacing definitive answers to interesting questions. Polls can only ever be representative of the opinions of those who responded, so it’s questionable whether there’s any long-term value in archiving them. That said, people love polls, and there’s plenty of them to explore on Poutsch.

The team behind Poutsch took part in the LeCamping accelerator in Paris last year, before relocating to New York City two months ago. In addition to being displayed on its website, Poutsch polls can be embedded on other sites, and the company has an API it hopes third-party developers will adopt in order to bring its polls to their apps. Beyond this, there’s a mobile app in the works.

The team is exploring monetization possibilities such as promoted questions, premium accounts, paid access to the API and possibly data analysis services based on information collected from polls.

➤ Poutsch

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