Is SurveyMonkey Good for New Product Surveys?

When you pay SurveyMonkey for responses are the survey takers actually reading the questions and considering their answers?

Gathering useful data from a survey requires two things, a well designed survey and an appropriate target audience. SurveyMonkey provides both: a great platform and paid access to target audiences that will answer the questions your survey poses. The company monitors how their audiences respond to your survey and will suggest changes to a survey's design and targeting to help insure its performance. But even with a great platform and A+ customer service (we know this from our own experience), the question remains, how good is their audience of survey respondents?

We decided to find out for ourselves if the people who respond to SurveyMonkey's surveys actually read and consider the questions they are asked. For this test we paid $1 per response for 100 responses and did no targeting. The test was a simple quiz about inventing. Here are the results. It looks like the people who participate in SurveyMoney's surveys really do consider the questions!

Beyond validating SurveyMonkey as a resource we also learned a few things regarding what people know about inventing. Basic knowledge of famous inventors is universal (although Edison's claim to the light bulb is weaker than most people know). However, most people are confused about patents, with 88% thinking, wrongly, that a provisional patent can be enforced to stop knockoffs (here's a brief intro to patents).

You can try the inventor survey yourself below.

-Mike Marks