Pollbob, a small, three-person polling startup from New Orleans’ The Idea Village accelerator has just acquired the older polling site Misterpoll. Prior to the acquisition, which closed on Friday, Pollbob had over 12,000 downloads and 7,000 active registered users. With Misterpoll’s 270K+ userbase now in tow, Pollbob is ready for rapid growth, says Pollbob Co-founder Zach Kupperman.
At the time of the acquisition, Misterpoll had 270,000 registered users, 500,000 uniques per month and 3.2 million pageviews per month. The company has been around for ages – Misterpoll launched in 1998 (the site’s web design doesn’t look much older, yikes), but has always flown under the radar, never taking outside funding.
Says Kupperman, Misterpoll had been a side project for the company’s original two-man team (who prefer to not be named). That’s one reason why, apparently, the company was happy to sell. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Pollbob, which now has $75,000 in funding following its soft launch in April 2011, plans to now pursue other acquisitions of polling companies as a growth strategy.
“Since polling/surveys have been around for a long time, we are in the unique position (for a small startup) of having lots of opportunities to acquire users through rolling up existing platforms relatively inexpensively,” says Kupperman.
The company says it hit over half a million opinions shared on its mobile app in October.
Prior to founding Pollbob, Kupperman has worn many hats, including time spent as a corporate and business attorney for startups, as the founder of PolicyPitch.com and the creator of the iPhone app Election Hub. He also served as Chairman for NOLA YURP, a nonprofit designed to attract young professionals to New Orleans. While in college, he founded CampusPokerShop, which he sold a few years later to private investors.
Pollbob’s other two founders include a founding partner of clothing retailer OldHarborOutfitters, Ben Jacobson, and Aditya Schulka, a Master of Computer Science grad from the University of Louisiana Lafayette.