It’s been an awesome ride so far.
Qzzr, the Lehi-based company behind the skyrocketing quiz creation tool and platform, has raised $2 million in a funding round led by local venture firm Kickstart Seed Fund. Two other local venture firms, Pelion Venture Partners and Peterson Partners, also participated in the round, as well as some firm based in Michigan.
“It’s been an awesome ride so far,” said Josh Little, founder and CEO of Qzzr, in an interview with Beehive Startups.
An awesome ride, indeed. The company wrote its first line of code last November. Since that time, Qzzr has managed to build a client list every startup in the world would commit real-life murder for if only they could claim it as their own.
ESPN, YAHOO!, Mashable, Reddit, College Humor, Yelp, IBM, The Wall Street Journal, KISSmetrics, HubSpot, CBS, and seemingly hundreds of other name brand companies all use Qzzr to help drive social traffic, create leads, and increase engagement on their respective sites.
Pretty damn awesome.
“It wasn’t even until April that I really thought we had our first legitimate product that people would start paying for,” said Little.
At this point in our story I feel obligated to provide our readers with the following disclaimer: The type of growth Qzzr is currently experiencing in such a short amount of time IS NOT TYPICAL FOR MOST STARTUPS.
To understand how Qzzr was able to quickly attract top talent to help drive its astronomic growth, it’s important to understand how this whole thing started. The company originated out of Movement Ventures, a venture studio Little founded during the fall of 2013 to hire super talented people to come up with awesome business ideas.
“Like a nursery grows plants from their own seeds, we grow companies from our own ideas,” claimed Movement Ventures at the time.
“Our goal at Movement was to build and buy things,” said Little. “The whole idea was to get a core team together and a pile of money and then build and buy things.”
Once Movement Ventures was up and running, the studio ran experiments and tried to validate five different ideas before they finally landed upon Qzzr.
“We killed a few of those ideas and put some others on ice, but Qzzr was just the idea that kind of stuck,” said Little.
Needless to say, the goal behind Movement Ventures changed once Qzzr really started taking off.
“It’s changed a lot,” said Little.
And then, like Jesus before him, Little told the story of Qzzr in the form of a parable to help teach our readers his miraculous startup growth ways.
We went out to fish new waters. We took this excursion. We brought all kinds of bait and poles, and we just wanted to fish. But we hooked a 1,200 lb. marlin, and once we got it hooked it made no sense to start casting lines on the other side of the boat. We’re saying, ‘Put those poles under your seats and everybody grab this line.’ We’re just going reel this fish in and call it a day.
With all of Qzzr’s momentum, we had to ask Little how long he envisioned this fishing excursion lasting.
“We’re running with Qzzr,” said Little. “We’re going to ride it to an exit. We think it will be probably a relatively quick exit just because of the rate of growth, the explosion of this market, and the need for engaging content that large publishers have. So, we don’t think it will be that long of a trip.”
At the moment, the future of Movement Ventures is unclear which, according to Little, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Going along with that same fishing analogy, when we get back to the dock, we’ll sell the boat and the fish, and if we all want to go out fishing again we’ll just buy another boat,” said Little.
In the last five months, more than 20,000 quizzes have been created using Qzzr. The company just released a new version of its website, transforming the homepage from a marketing site to a destination site where visitors can find and create quizzes on any topic.
“We’re really excited about building out our channel and our own audience in the coming months,” said Little.
Published 9/24/2014
